Posts Tagged ‘Hi5’

hi5 manages to keep our attention lately, with all the product roll outs the social network has, geared directly towards its Game channel and virtual goods-based economy. The latest to team up with hi5 is SmallWorlds, the 3D virtual community that launched last year.

The SmallWorlds integration with hi5′s Game channel is pretty seamless, as SmallWorlds already took advantage of several social media services for building out its own feature set. Incorporating things like YouTube video channels and other media consumption options, the virtual world is one of the more robust offerings out there.
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hi5 is expanding its gaming section with the addition of RockYou’s Pets game to all of its users. The RockYou Pet game has gained a steady following in its own right, so hi5 is seemingly looking to ramp up the offerings of its own game channel by layering in online activity that is sure to keep users around for extended periods of time, with game titles they already know and trust.

For RockYou, the new partnership means that hi5′s 63 million users will be able to access its gaming products. As one of the major application developers, RockYou has been among the first to create game apps for most of the major platforms, from Facebook to MySpace. So it’s no surprise to see RockYou reaching further with the new partnership with hi5.
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hi5 is extending its Games section by partnering with Mochi Media, the online games network. After launching Games earlier this year, hi5 is quickly expanding on its gaming portal, incorporating several new entertainment options for users and more revenue options for itself.

As with its own native games, those offered through the partnership with Mochi media will take advantage of the recently launched hi5 Coins, the social network’s virtual currency. While users will not be able to use hi5 Coins for direct transactions, there are plans for future options of purchasing downloadable games, challenging friends, accessing premium game content and status upgrades.
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hi5 has just added Games to its social network. It’s yet another way to waste time on hi5, and even interact with friends as many of the games are socially-integrated. With this global launch, I actually think it’s important that hi5 focused on creating the games in a socially-integrated environment, because it extends the social capabilities of hi5 as a network and communications platform.

It’s also interesting that hi5 has decided to launch Games as a native application within its network, avoiding the open platform approach where the majority of games would be made to available to hi5 users through third party developers. If you look at a platform like Facebook’s, there are several games available to users but they’re the result of third party developers that have taken advantage of Facebook’s open platform for both access and distribution. Some of these games are more social than others, and application games overall aren’t unified, even for some separate games that come from the same developer.
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hi5 entered into the virtual currency space late last year, and it seemed like an all around good move for the social network. Having now delved into the world of virtual gifting, enabling easier virtual exchange was achieved by the offering of hi5 Coins, which can be applied to a great number of things representing supply and demand through the network in this sense. So where does that leave hi5 in the grand scheme of social networks? VentureBeat seems to think that virtual gifting could be he jackpot for hi5.
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In the truest of holiday spirits, social network hi5 has teamed up with micro-lending site Kiva.org in order to provide an integrated way in which hi5 users can make direct, person-to-person microloans via Kiva’s service. This will be accomplished through a Kiva community profile on the hi5 network, enabling the users on hi5 to lend directly to the entrepreneurs.

Why does hi5 or Kiva need a partnership like this? It enables both hi5 and Kiva to operate on a global scale. Kiva already acted as a financial medium for micro-lenders and those in developing countries in need of money to launch their startups. But digging into a large and already global network like hi5 means that Kiva can tap into hi5′s social network in order to promote more giving.
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Virtual gifting worked for Facebook. So hi5 is trying its hand at the virtual economy as well. Today, the hi5 social network is announcing a new gifting application called hi5 Gifts. Similar to a recent application launched by Facebook, hi5 Gifts revolves around holiday-related virtual presents. With an initial offering of 36 virtual gifts, each present will represent a particular world custom or culture. These gifts will be based on holiday traditions and other customs, such as a virtual “Rosca,” a cake that Mexicans eat on January 6th to celebrate Three Kings’ Day.
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Techcrunch is reporting that hi5, the worlds third largest social network, is laying off 10 to 15 percent of their staff. Mike Trigg of hi5, told Techcrunch that the company is hiring at the same time though and there won’t be a significant change in the net number of employees at the company.

hi5′s growth has appeared to stagnate over the past few months based on both comScore data as well as Alexa data. Previously I suggested that the social networking space was practically immune to the recession since users would continue logging on to the internet daily. Additionally, given how early we are in social advertising, I wouldn’t expect budgets to be cut significantly (if at all) within social media.

Instead budgets could even rise as Gary Vaynerchuk suggests in one of his recent personal videos. Honestly, while it’s easy to group layoffs over the past week or two into the recession group, I think any exits that take place in the social networking space during this time should be thoroughly examined. Just because there are departures and potential restructurings, does not mean that the social web economy is going to be substantially impacted.

Conversely, after reading all of the reports by venture capitalists over the past few weeks, it wouldn’t be surprising to see many of the venture backed startups cut back on their spending. The only reason is not based on revenue projections but based on a more challenging environment to raise later rounds of funding. From what Mike Trigg said, it sounds like basic restructuring. I’m interested to see if this trend continues.

Last night hi5 announced the release of a new translations application which is compatible with the OpenSocial standard. The new service is being promoted as the first major translation tool using the OpenSocial standard. I’m not quite sure why the release was phrased this way to be honest. The reality is that this is simply a translations application for hi5.

Given hi5′s international reach, it makes it much more easier to find users willing to translate applications abroad. Two companies that are immediately taking advantage of this new service is RockYou and iLike. While it makes all OpenSocial applications more easily translated, it requires the applications to be accessible on hi5 in order to have them translated.

This application is currently not available on other platforms. hi5 continues to make announcements regarding them being the first to release specific features related to OpenSocial (including the first to implement version 0.8 of the OpenSocial standard) but developers have been complaining. While features are being released, they aren’t always usable and hi5 has been somewhat delayed in rolling out fixes to any issues on the platform.

hi5 continues to roll out new features though and it’s clear that they are taking the platform seriously. If you have an OpenSocial application and are looking to have it translated, you may want to test out hi5′s new translation service.

Today hi5 announced the release of the OpenSocial 0.8 standard which has been in beta for the past few weeks. According to the release, over 1,800 applications have been installed on the platform to date. The most significant change here? The launch of a RESTful API which enables developers to choose their development language rather than being forced into Javascript. This is a huge upgrade for the OpenSocial standard.

Is this a big announcement for OpenSocial? Not necessarily in terms of the standard’s reach but it definitely does imply substantial upgrades from a development perspective. As OpenSocial improves, the standard continues to face challenges in terms of adoption by developers. While the applications on MySpace, hi5 and other platforms appear to be growing rapidly, Facebook continues to dwarf the competition.

While that may not be the case indefinitely, it appears that developers have been pushed to their limits. Take the MySpace Data Availability initiative for instance. It is essentially a copycat of Facebook Connect but was first to launch and while it may be confusing, is supposedly completely functional. So far there has been no word of any large applications that have been launched with the service.

It’s not completely clear why this is the case but it appears that there is much more anticipation surrounding Facebook Connect. The announcement of this new version of OpenSocial may perhaps attract the same sort of response: a congratulatory pat on the back without comparable developer adoption. I could easily be wrong though.

Ali Partovi of iLike for instance has an enthusiastic comment in the press release, “I’m delighted that hi5 is the first Open Social container to release the 0.8 upgrade.” One can only be so excited about a new version of OpenSocial being released though. I think we’re all still waiting on version 1.0 to arrive. Hopefully my negative tone is not taken whole-heartedly.

I believe that this is a significant step for OpenSocial and for hi5. It will be interesting to see how the battle between OpenSocial and the Facebook platform plays out over the coming months.