imeem Media Platform's blog on imeem

Intro to Media APIs

Sachin Rekhi — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:53:29 -0000

I gave a presentation on Wednesday at the SocialMedia Business School Event in NYC on an introduction to Media APIs. There are a ton of great media APIs available (including imeem's of course!) that can help app developers to enhance existing applications and build entirely new experiences centered around media.

I've included the slides below for your viewing pleasure:

| View | Upload your own

Sachin Rekhi
Product Manager, Platform

imeem Media Platform at Google I/O

Sachin Rekhi — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:48:19 -0000

I had the opportunity to present the imeem Media Platform at this year’s Google I/O conference in San Francisco. For those of you who weren’t able to attend, here’s a video from my panel, “Meet the OpenSocial Containers.”

I’ll also be attending and presenting at the Social Media Business School Event in New York on June 25. Feel free to shoot me an email if you’re in NY and you want to connect.

Sachin Rekhi
Product Manager, Platform

Added OAuth signed makeRequests

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:15:21 -0000

We are excited about the release of the OpenSocial v0.8 spec as it adds many great enhancements to the platform, including a RESTful API, OAuth support, lifecycle events, preloading of data, and much more.

We are eager to implement these enhancements and make them available to our developers as soon as they each come online.

One of the first improvements we are making available to developers today is allowing signing of makeRequests using OAuth. Now if you simply add opt_params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.AUTHORIZATION] = gadgets.io.AuthorizationType.SIGNED to your opt_params in your makeRequest call, the request will be appropriately signed as specified in the Signed authorization section of the OpenSocial v0.8 spec.

The other implication of this is that the src urls for the iframes in which imeem apps are loaded are now appropriately signed using OAuth. This changes the query string parameters that are available to developers. Developers should no longer use owner_key and viewer_key and instead take advantage of the new opensocial_owner_id and opensocial_viewer_id parameters.

As always, let us know any questions or feedback you have in the developer forums.

Sachin Rekhi
Product Manager, Platform

Amp Up Your OpenSocial Apps on imeem

Sachin Rekhi — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:29:23 -0000

We’re happy to announce that the imeem Media Platform now supports OpenSocial. It’s been great to see developers creating new media-centric apps in the sandbox since we launched the platform, and we want to continue making development easier and more efficient.

Developers can now easily port their existing OpenSocial apps to imeem to gain exposure to our audience of over 24 million users. Our team is also very excited to announce that we have built OpenSocial extensions for developers to super-charge their OpenSocial apps with imeem’s media content. The imeem-specific extensions allow you to access media metadata from JavaScript, similar to how you access user profile data through OpenSocial. This means that you can now build JavaScript, HTML and Adobe Flex media applications that access imeem’s entire catalog of music, video, and photo content.

Here are the details of what we’re releasing today:

•Full support for the core OpenSocial JavaScript APIs, including access to people and relationships on imeem as well as access to data persistence APIs

•Added support for the OpenSocial gadget xml, making it easy for developers to specify their entire application in the OpenSocial gadget xml standard

•imeem-specific OpenSocial extensions, making it possible for developers to access imeem’s media metadata through the OpenSocial JavaScript APIs. This includes the ability to get back a specific user’s media, search for media in imeem’s vast media library, as well as get access to the most popular music, video, and photo content on imeem.

If you would like to port your OpenSocial application to imeem or start developing new media-centric apps, check out our developer documentation.

If you have any feedback, questions or comments, please visit the developer forums.

Also, to get timely updates on future imeem Media Platform updates, subscribe to our RSS feed.

Happy coding!

Sachin

Ten app ideas

Sachin Rekhi — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:39:23 -0000

One of the primary reasons we opened up our platform was to start breaking down some of the barriers to innovation by allowing all developers to access the rich library of content, features and information on imeem. The imeem Media Platform enables unlimited possibilities to create great new media experiences. We’ve listed our top ten favorite application ideas below and hope developers will pick up some of these concepts, better them and bring them to fruition. With ideas ranging from recommendations to gaming, there should be something that peaks your interest.

On another note, it’s been two weeks since we launched the imeem Media Platform, and we’re very excited at the number of developers who have started to play with the platform. Remember to keep giving us feedback in the forums as you’re developing.

Happy coding!

1. Collaborative Playlisting – Collaborative playlists to allow multiple users to build a playlist for a party, event, or just for fun!

2. Recommendations – Generate personalized radio stations based on user preferences by utilizing the recommendation and user data that imeem provides.

3. Playable Charts – Create playable billboard charts from your favorite charts source, whether it’s Billboard, iTunes, Amazon or anywhere else.

4. MP3 Blogs – Make an app to syndicate all recent blog posts from your favorite mp3 blog to imeem and allow you to listen to a playlist with all recently blogged songs.

5. Media Uploaders – Desktop media uploader that integrates with iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player to easily upload your media collection to imeem.

6. Chat – Create chat rooms around particular artists or listening parties for new music releases.

7. Featured Songs – Allow a user to feature a song on their profile for their current mood, for their favorite 80’s song, love song, or whatever else you can think of.

8. Music Games – “Name that tune” game that tests your musical expertise and allows you to challenge your friends.

9. Live Music Recommendations – Create playable concert listings allowing you to sample songs from artists who are coming to town.

10. Browser Plug-ins – As you browse the web, make it easy to automatically add any song you encounter to your imeem library for later enjoyment.

Sachin Rekhi

We’re open-minded about media

Sachin Rekhi — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:59:40 -0000

Today we released the imeem Media Platform, a new platform that enables developers to quickly create applications for imeem that integrate our community, features, and our music, video, and photo content.

The imeem Media Platform includes a web services API and client libraries that give developers and partners access to many of imeem’s most popular features. Using the API, developers can:

• Access any of the millions of songs, videos, and photos available on imeem
• Fully customize the imeem media player (via a “chromeless” player)
• Upload music, videos, or photos, and modify metadata for that content
• Access imeem’s social graph, including users, friends, and associated profile data
• Create, edit, and manage new playlists, or access millions of music, video and photo playlists created by imeem users
• Search imeem’s media content by keyword, artist, song title, or album
• Access imeem’s recommendation engine and discovery tools

imeem is providing the imeem Media Platform, as well as the underlying infrastructure, for free. This includes access to our growing community of over 24 million users and the heavy lifting of hosting, transcoding and streaming media for your application.

Starting today, we’ve opened access to a sandbox environment where you can create, test, and tinker with new applications for imeem. This is a preliminary step towards making these new applications available to the imeem community.

Why are we doing this?

Over the past year, we were hearing from developers that they wanted to work with us on new applications and features for imeem, or on ways to customize our existing features. Rather than rely only on our team to dream up new imeem-powered experiences, we decided to open up imeem to the broader development community.

The imeem Media Platform is about much more than just allowing people to port their existing apps to imeem --- it’s about enabling a new wave of apps, powered by imeem’s extensive library of video, music and photo content. We hope that this is a catalyst for an entirely new set of applications that use our media and features in cool and unexpected ways. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Over the past month, we have gradually rolled all of imeem onto our platform. Along the way, we’ve introduced a few new features the team created using the platform – features like a redesigned imeem player and new tools that make it simple to create music and video playlists.

What’s next?

imeem was a founding partner in the OpenSocial initiative, and we plan to offer OpenSocial support in the coming months. This will enable developers who have already created applications for other open social networking platforms to easily port them to imeem, and extend the capabilities of those applications with the added value of imeem’s feature set, media library, social graph and more.

We’re in the very early stages of this rollout and your feedback is incredibly valuable to us. We encourage you to share any and all questions and thoughts on the developer forum. Otherwise, hope you have fun playing around.

Sachin Rekhi
Product Manager, Platform