imeem Widgets

last revision: 9/24/2008

imeem exposes a suite of imeem widgets that can be embedded off of imeem.com and used to provide media playback in a variety of websites and applications across the web.

Widget Types

imeem provides widgets for each of its popular media types, including music, videos, and photo slideshows. For music and videos, imeem exposes both single track and playlist widgets.

Sample Integrations

The following sites showcase a variety of compelling uses of the imeem widgets across the web:

Apture

http://www.apture.com/experience/

Apture provides a rich multimedia experience for bloggers and web publishers, allowing them to create rich links on their site that bring up relevant content in multimedia overlays. For example, bloggers can easily expose links that provide YouTube videos, imeem music, Flickr photos, Wikipedia articles, and much more, all accessible right from the blogger’s website.

Apture uses the imeem search web service to allow a user to find songs that they wish to link in their blog. The user can preview the tracks through the imeem single-track widget. Then when a user clicks on the link, the imeem single-track widget comes up and begins to play, allowing users to experience the music all right from the blog’s site.

Slide Top Friends

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2425101550

Slide leverages imeem to power music on their Top Friends user profiles. From within the Slide Top Friends’ application, users can search for songs, create playlists, and feature those playlists on their Top Friends profile.

Slide leverages the imeem search web service to allow a user to search for songs to add to their playlist. They also take advantage of our playlist web services to create and manage playlists on behalf of the user. Finally, they embed the imeem music playlist widget to allow users to play back the media from a user’s Top Friends profile on Facebook.

Available Content

All content available on imeem.com is available for embedding through imeem widgets off of imeem. This includes imeem’s entire collection of music, videos, and photos. Users can also upload their own content to imeem.com and then embed it across the web.

Depending on imeem’s content partner licenses, certain content available through imeem widgets is limited to a 30 second sample. This is on a per content partner basis and varies depending on imeem’s content licenses in a particular geographic region.

Embedding Widgets

imeem website

The easiest way to get embed code that you can use on your site is to go to the page on imeem containing the media item or playlist you wish to embed. On that page you can copy the appropriate embed code.

Help on retrieving the embed code can be found here:
http://www.imeem.com/faq/category/6/media_features/#Embeds

imeem web services

In addition to manually retrieving the embed code using the imeem website, developers can also programmatically get embed code that can be automatically embedded on their site.

The imeem web services expose a variety of methods that return media info in either XML or JSON. These result sets contain a musicEmbedUrl attribute that can be used to construct the appropriate embed code. For example, the mediaSearch web service can be used to retrieve media search results as well as the embed code URL. Playlists info also provides a playlistEmbedUrl that can be used much the same way. All the corresponding playlist methods provide the playlistEmbedUrl attribute as well.

Customization Options

The imeem widget can be customized to fit the styling and size requirements of your website or application.

Basic color schemes, shuffle, and auto-play options can be customized directly from the media page on imeem. If on a media page you click the Share button, choose the “Link to or embed this music playlist,” you will see the customization options and the generated embed code.

In addition, the embed code can be manually customized by modifying its associated variables. The following customizable variables are available for the embed player:

Property Name	Required	Description
width	Required	The width of the embed player
height	Required	The height of the embed player
aus	Optional	Whether the embed player should automatically start playing when a user navigates to a page containing it
autoShuffle	Optional	Whether the songs in the playlist should be shuffled by default
backColor	Optional	The background color of the player
primaryColor	Optional	Primary text color of the player
secondaryColor	Optional	Secondary text color of the player
linkColor	Optional	Color for links in the player

The following playlist embed code shows you how you can customize each of the above variables:

<object width="300" height="290">
    <param name="movie" value="http://media.imeem.com/pl/PBvn9SwldX/aus=false/autoShuffle=false/"></param>
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
    <param name="FlashVars" value="backColor=000000&primaryColor=ffffff&secondaryColor=777777&linkColor=51A001" />
    <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param>
    <embed src="http://media.imeem.com/pl/PBvn9SwldX/aus=false/autoShuffle=false/" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="300" height="290" wmode="transparent" allowScriptAccess="always" FlashVars="backColor=000000&primaryColor=ffffff&secondaryColor=777777&linkColor=51A001"></embed>
</object>

NOTE: Ensure you add the allowScriptAccess="always" parameter to allow the links throughout the player to imeem and to buy tracks on Amazon and iTunes to function properly.

Using Widgets on imeem

If you are building applications on imeem.com, you have several options for integrating media. The deepest level of integration with the greatest customization is by using the ActionScript 3 Client Cibrary, which provides a skinless player from which the developer can build a custom user interface. This requires developing your player in Adobe ActionScript 3 and Flex.

Alternatively, a developer can leverage imeem's existing widgets to enhance their application with media playback. The imeem media widgets can be embedded on all of the imeem views, including the profile, canvas, and about views. If the embed player is added to the inline script of each of these views, the player will get full media playback according to the imeem.com content licensing rules. However, if the embed player is embedded through an external iframe on the canvas page, the streaming rules that apply to off imeem embeds will apply, as described in the Available Content section above.