Today, iLike released a social playlist app that lets you create a music playlsit and embed it on any Website. Then through Friend Connect, anyone can sign in and change or add to the playlist. I’ve embedded one below seeded with five songs that I’ve called TechCrunch House Party. Go ahead and add to it, but only good songs, please. Or create your own. Update: Oops, I created a regular playlist that can’t be edited by others by mistake. Turns out your site needs to be set up with Google Friend Connect for the social playlist to work. I guess you can suggest songs for me to add in comments.
Friend Connect is Google/OpenSocial’s answer to data portability. Just last December, it opened to all Websites. That means that anyone with a Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID username and password can sign in.
iLike, for its part, offers full song streaming through a partnership with Rhapsody (which limits non-subscribers to 25 free tracks per month). The Rhapsody-imposed limit could eventually become a barrier to consumer adoption. The other problem with the app is that it is missing is the ability to vote up or down songs. There is no mechanism to ensure the playlist gets better as more people touch it rather than get worse. If iLike added that, it could start generating some amazing crowd-DJed playlists. As it stands, I fear most of these playlists will not get better the more people interact with them, which is how the value of all social apps should be measured.