This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Hadi about the new services being offered by iLike that they announced a couple weeks ago at f8. I actually did an interview with them at f8 but for some reason my recorder didn’t seem to work. This time it worked great and I’ve included my interview below. During the interview we discussed the impact of Facebook Connect on iLike as well as the launch of the new Great Apps program recently announced by Facebook. Hadi also was pleased by the new change in Facebook metrics that was announced today.

The company recently surpassed 30 million users on their applications across all of the sites that the are on including Facebook, MySpace and their destination site iLike.com. iLike is also preparing to release a developer API that enables developers to embed the entire version of various songs. Hadi gave the example of an application that creates a wedding playlist. I’m sure there are countless other examples of applications that can be built with this new API.

iLike, which was originally built out from GarageBand.com, is now the most popular social music service on the web. Listen to my podcast with Hadi to learn more.

Update
imeem contacted me to informat me that my statement about iLike being “the most popular social music service on the web” is in fact inaccurate. imeem is also the largest social music service in the world based on rights, reach and traffic.

Today iLike, the leading social music discovery service on the web, announced an ad platform for concert promoters and a music development platform for web developers. The ad platform enables promoters to reach out directly to fans based on location and musical taste. Advertisers can also place their advertisements across iLike’s entire network or Garageband.com, a site primarily targeted to independent bands.

For users of the iLike application, songs can now be listened to as full-length tracks for up to 25 songs per month. While the ad platform is significant, I’m not so sure that listening to 25 full tracks per month provides much of an incentive to use the platform. Developers will have access to iLike and Rhapsody’s entire library of music to embed on their own sites and applications.

This service sounds similar (if not identical) to the soon to be released platform by imeem. Given that the press release states that this new service will be launching in the coming months, I’m guessing that this announcement was intended to attract developer attention of the upcoming API. The company has now surpassed 30 million registered users, making it one of the largest social music services on the web to date.

iLike faces fierce competition from companies like Last.fm, imeem and Qloud which was recently acquired by Buzznet. This space continues to heat up and iLike’s release highlights their rapid growth. I would expect a number of similar announcements to coincide this week with Facebook’s f8 event which could possibly turn out to be the largest event for the social web industry this year.

If you’d like more details about the new iLike ad platform you can visit www.iLike.com/advertise’. Developers can also check out www.iLike.com/developer to be part of the new iLike developer program.