Hadi Partovi

Following the news that MySpace had shuttered iLike, GeekWire reached out to Hadi Partovi, one of the co-founders of iLike who ran the music service with his twin brother, Ali Partovi.

Hadi Partovi minced no words in his response, pointing out that iLike at one point had more than 60 million users — more than some of the hottest online services of today. Partovi cited iLike’s decline at MySpace the latest in a string of a technology assets mismanaged by Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp sold MySpace to Specific Media Inc. and pop star Justin Timberlake last year.

Here’s what Partovi had to say on the subject of MySpace closing down iLike …

Online music is certainly a difficult space. Today’s decision by MySpace’s new owners was probably an easy one, and one can easily argue that it was the right decision, given the state iLike was in by the time they acquired MySpace.

It’s sad to see a social music site that once boasted 60 million users (more than Spotify, or Pinterest), reduced to nothing. Rupert Murdoch squandered a lot of tech assets under his management, the fall of iLike is just scratching the surface. Given how much money Rupert makes off spreading the evil cancer of Fox “News,” I think he deserves the bad rap he gets for this mismanagement.

But much of iLike’s demise is also due to radical changes in the Facebook platform. If you look at the top Facebook apps of 2007 — iLike, Flixster, Slide, RockYou, SGN, Zynga, only one of them evolved enough to survive these changes, the rest died like guinea pigs.

Fortunately for newer apps, the current Facebook platform is much more mature and stable than it was in 2007 – it’s harder to build a viral app today, but that is a reasonable tradeoff for platform stability and a reduction in app spam.

On the positive side, the iLike team is all thriving at new startups. Some are at Facebook Seattle, some are at local Seattle startups that all your readers should check out: ThinkFuse, Familiar, and PaperKarma.

Previously on GeekWire: Paul McCartney jets from streaming music services; Rhapsody calls it a ‘shock’

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