The millions of needles in imeem's haystack of music, videos and people just became easier to find, thanks to a new design that highlights imeem-programmed content, offers a customized discovery page for each user and bundles everything on the site that relates to a specific artist onto a single page.
"What we've been working on for the past several month is a site-wide redesign," imeem head of marketing and business development Steve Jang told Wired.com. "It's been focused on solving a problem that we faced as we started to grow in traffic and started to install all the media types that you see on imeem right now, which is 'how do we expose the content, the data and the community to each other within a large construct like our site and our widget network."
The new design mirrors the three main ways in which Jang says people have been interacting with music on imeem. "Some users are looking for content to be featured to them, to be recommended very explicitly [from the] top-down. A large part of our community was really focused in on the one-to-one social recommendation and discovery experience, and really wanting that implicit and explicit data from other users. And then some users like the random walk of social networking and social browsing."
To that end, imeem launched three new sections on Wednesday. A new spotlight section features new releases from its music and film partners, staff picks and a feed of news from music blogs, imeem's own music bloggers and users, for those who prefer to have programmed content served up to them.
Then there's the data-personalized discover section (pictured), which looks different for each user who has created a free account on the site. Imeem tracks what you play and add to playlists, which artists you've become a fan of, what you've rated and what you've commented on. By running that data through its recommendation algorithm, imeem generates a unique discovery page for each user.
Imeem also now categorizes its music by genre and breaks it downinto various charts (top ranked, rising, falling, most discussed and soon) in its updated music section.
"If I want to see the top hip hop tracks in the last seven days, I cando that.," said Yang. "If I want to see the fastest-rising rock videosover the last month, I'll be able to do that as well." By going to any user's page, you can see what they've been up to and listen to the stuff they've been listening to. And if you create a playlist, you get to see who else has listened to it or embedded it on their site.
Finally, the company took a page out of MySpace's playbook, so tospeak, by creating unified artist pages that bring together everythingto do with a given artist in one spot: songs, albums, playlists, blogposts, videos, events, comments, related artists and stuff you mightlike from imeem's content partners. For example, here are the pages forThe Fall, Mogwai and Radiohead. When you click on an artist name after searching forit on imeem, the site does not bring up these pages – just lists of stuff that has been tagged with that artist name. You can get to any artist page by searching for that artist in the music search box and then clicking on the result for the artist rather than one of their songs.
It's well worth tracking down these artist pages, too, because they let you listen to albumsby each of these artists for free and on-demand. Some albums have a fewsongs missing from them, since these albums are drawn from imeem'slarge catalog of user-uploaded MP3s. But in many cases, you can streamentire albums for free after finding them on artist pages.
See Also:
