iMeeM

imeem is a social media service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. Launched in October 2004, the service has both a social network structure as well as a content browsing/filtering structure similar to that of Flickr and YouTube. It works on an advertising based business model, and is therefore free to use.

According to imeem executives imeem has more than 25 million visitors per month with over 65,000 new users every day. Web tracking site quantcast.com corroborates these visitor numbers and indicates that imeem is the just outside the top 100 websites in the world and rank it as the top social music site.

Features

Visitors to the site may access music, video, photographs, blog posts and polls; however, commenting, rating, tagging and the posting of new content requires a user to register an account. A key feature promoted by imeem is the media playlist where content posted from multiple sources may be collected into a playlist which itself may be published for comments, tags and rating. Playlists can consist of videos, music or images, with the recent introduction of the ‘Remix Player’ music and images may be combined into a single presentation with customizable image transition effects. Several websites have since imitated the playlist feature, either adding it to an existing media player widget (e.g. Youtube) or building their entire service around the idea (ProjectPlaylist).

imeem provides a number of mechanisms to make content available to audiences outside of the site through RSS syndication and embedding content into external sites. However, since February 2007 MySpace has been taking steps to limit the posting of imeem content on its site: any updates or comments have the word ‘imeem’ removed upon posting, making it impossible to even mention the site. It has since emerged that this block is likely because myspace is attempting to copy the music features of imeem and is negotiating with record labels to license content .

imeem used to require a software client, to support its distributed database model and provide features such as instant messaging and file sharing. However, this has since been phased out, and the site has been entirely web based since June 2007.

imeem links users through topic groups which were originally called “meems”, relating to common interests. Media content can exist in custom profile pages and topic groups (called “meems”, from the word “meme“), as well as in browsable content channels and charts. Meems can serve as online communities for artists, bands, clubs, films, schools, festivals, concert tours, friends, and sports enthusiasts. However a recent redesign of the site has renamed most of the references to the word “meem” with “group”, presumably this is an attempt to reduce user confusion over the word. Formerly, it was possible for links to be made between groups which had related subject matters. However, this linking feature was only ever implemented on the client, and it is no longer possible to add or remove links with the website – the links are still visible on older groups, and officially created groups appear to have links added at creation time.

History

The service has changed drastically since its original inception. When it first launched the client was the primary platform, the website merely existed as a means for users to register and download the client. The original service was billed as a ‘distributed, peer-to-peer, social network’ every client on the network had a database, which would accelerate access to content deemed to be close to the user. The database would also generate and store references to media content shared on the network, if a user shared photos or a podcast then the data would only exist on the client database network, users who wanted to view the content would access it by peering directly with the publisher.

While this distributed model was interesting it proved to be difficult to attract many users since the only way to participate was to download the imeem client software. The application proved to be something of a resource hog for power users since the database could grow to quite large proportions just by associating with a few individuals who were sharing a lot of content.

Over time more features have been added to the website and now the client software is no longer functional and the innovative distributed database model has been centralized. Now that all of imeem’s features are available without requiring a client download the service has rapidly grown in popularity, in particular with classes of user who have traditionally found themselves on the other side of the digital divide. According to comscore web traffic statistics imeem.com was the fastest growing social site from October 2006-2007 with its usage rising almost 1600%.

On January 28th 2008 imeem announced that it was acquiring the music locker service anywhere.fm.

On February 1st 2008 imeem acquired the online music distributor Snocap, it had already been making extensive use of Snocap’s audio fingerprinting technology and music database.

Taken from:  Wikipedia

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