Introduction

last revision: 5/14/2008

The imeem Media Platform allows developers to create entirely new imeem experiences that utilize imeem’s extensive features, vast social graph, and robust library of music, videos, and photos. imeem delivers the underlying infrastructure and content licenses, leaving you free to focus on building great applications.

Using the imeem Media Platform, developers can:

Access media on imeem, including music, videos, and photos
Tap into imeem’s social graph, including users, friends, and associated profile data
Fully customize a skinless imeem media player
Upload music, videos, and photos and modify associated metadata
Search imeem’s media content by keyword, artist, title, or album
Access imeem’s most frequently played music and videos
Leverage imeem's recommendation engine to get related content for any music or video item
Create, edit, and manage new playlists or access millions of music, video, and photo playlists created by imeem users

Types of Applications

On imeem

The imeem Media Platform provides a variety of ways for developers to build applications on imeem. This allows developers to pick the technology they are most familiar with as well as the approach that best suits the needs of their application.

Adobe Flex
Developers can build their media applications in Adobe Flex. These applications can be exposed on both the profile and canvas views. Adobe Flex provides the greatest control and flexibility for media playback. All the existing imeem media players are built with Adobe Flex for this reason. The imeem Media Platform provides an ActionScript 3 Adobe Flex library that exposes user, friend, and media metadata as well as media playback services.

OpenSocial JavaScript\HTML
imeem is an OpenSocial container, making it easy for developers to build applications in JavaScript and HTML as well as easily port their existing OpenSocial applications to imeem. Beyond the standard OpenSocial people and persistence methods, imeem has developed extensions for accessing media metadata from JavaScript. This allows you to build compelling media applications entirely in JavaScript and HTML.

External IFrame
For the canvas view, imeem allows developers to use an external iframe hosted on their own server. This makes it easy for developers to use their favorite server-side web language to render their application canvas pages, including PHP, Python, Ruby, and many more. imeem exposes a set of HTTP web services that can be used to query imeem for user, friend, and media data from the external iframe. Profile views, however, cannot be external iframes and must instead be either Adobe Flex or OpenSocial JavaScript\HTML.

Off imeem

Additionally, developers can build web or desktop applications that exist off of the imeem.com site. While these types of applications are free to use the user, friend, and media metadata, media playback is not available to applications off of imeem.com. The following approaches can be used for building applications off of imeem.

Web Services
The imeem HTTP web services can be used to access user, friend, and media metadata. A developer is free to access this from any server-side programming language they wish.

Adobe Flex
The ActionScript 3 Adobe Flex library can be used for applications off of imeem as it provides a wrapper for the imeem web services. The media playback service, however, cannot be accessed off of imeem.

We are initially releasing a developer-focused sandbox environment for developers to begin building and testing their applications as well as to provide us feedback on the platform. Please let us know what you think by participating in our forums as your feedback is very important to us.

We will be announcing periodic updates on our blog. Stay tuned for additional announcements as the platform evolves in the coming months.