iLike, which launched in late 2006, is a social music recommendation service that now has more than 50 million registered users. It tracks what you listen to and like and gives you recommendations on new music based on that data as well as what your friends are listening to. It is the top music application on Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and just about every other social network other than MySpace, which has MySpace Music.

The recent distressed exit of iLike reminds us of the need to build real value in our startups if we hope to create lasting companies and wealth.

If we look over the past fifteen years of webtime, we see a few categories emerge where real value was created:

- Efficiency/Cost Reduction (DoubleClick, RedHat, PayPal, Craigslist)
- Monetizeable audience (Yahoo!, Google, AOL)
- Repeat customer commerce (Amazon, eBay, Netflix)
- Solve a pain point (Checkpoint, Postini)
- Create new markets (EA, Google)

More on this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-i...peanuts-2009-8

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17...quiring-ilike/