Thumbplay announced on Thursday a deal it just wrapped up with iLike, a music recommendation service big on Facebook, to exclusively stock iLike's virtual shelves with ringtones.
Thumbplay's ringtones are disguised on iLike.com by the generic command to "get ringtones," and placed alongside iTunes links. They'll also be sprinkled throughout the iLike Challenge game on iLike's site and will be available for purchase through the iLike Facebook app.
This is a definite win for Thumbplay. The mobile content distributor's limp Facebook app, a Photo Portal that pushes pictures uploaded from a Thumbplay locker to a mobile phone, has so far only grossed 10 active daily users. By teaming up with iLike, Facebook's big cheese music discovery app, with nearly 600,000 active users, Thumbplay has jumped on a better angle for getting their products to Facebook users, and dropping coins in their pocket as well.
Related story: Thumbplay: Unlimited storage now, Facebook apps coming soon
Thumbplay, a sales hub for mobile ringtones, videos, and games, will announce tomorrow at the CTIA conference in San Francisco, California, that it has also become a free database for user-generated content.
Account-holders can upload and store media from either their cell phone or computer to their Thumbplay "locker." From there, they can send images and clips to friends via SMS or e-mail. Users can also download content from fellow Thumplay members for free, and grab code to affix the image on any personal Web page that accepts HTML embedding. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a way to assimilate another user's contribution into your personal media gallery. UPDATE: They can, however, be stored in a separate folder for favorites.
Thumbplay will also reveal two upcoming Facebook apps, whose presence will complete the circle of what is essentially a free storage and sharing service with some social networking characteristics.
The first of these is Thumbplay Share, which will display photos from your personal locker and automatically update them when you add a new image to Thumbplay.com. Photo Portal does the reverse, allowing users to send photos from Facebook albums to any cell phone.
The apps won't be publicly available until an unspecified date later this week, though Thumbplay's President and CEO, Are Traasdahl, stopped by CNET's San Francisco office to demonstrate. They look pretty effective so far, but more word on that when I get a chance to try them out in the wild.
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