August 2007 Archives

You can now add your friends as a tag for any photo that you upload. Tagging means identifying your friends is in a photo. Tagging is a way for you tell everyone who is in your photos. When you tag a friend in a photo, your friend will receive a notification that they have been tagged in a photo. 

All you have to do is click on one of your photos, place the frame on a person's face and start typing the name of the person you want to tag. You will see a list of friends whose names match the letters you typed. You can then go ahead and select the friend's name to tag that person.

Any photos that have been tagged with you will appear in an album titled "Photos tagged with <YOUR NAME> " in your photos section. You will also receive a notification when a friend has added you as a tag for one of their photos photos.

Enjoy!

As you know by now, Hi5 supports widgets from Slide and Rock You.  To accomplish this integration we wrote a completely new software platform.  The end result is http://api.hi5.com/.  The software that makes it possible is called Enunciate.

Enunciate is an open-source toolkit that generates a complete interoperable system for providing Web Services.  It does this by allowing you to place metadata and documentation about your desired services directly in your code. Invoking the enunciate compiler generates a complete web site with documentation, server endpoints, and client libraries.

We're using the following features now:

• REST endpoints for Widgets, Feeds, and Authentication.
  
• SOAP support, including generated SOAP client libraries.
• JSON output support.
• Full documentation coming direct from the code.

Hi5 sponsored much of the work for Enunciate 1.3 and will continue to work with the primary author and community to improve and extend the Enunciate code.  The roadmap has a number of exciting features that you will soon see on the Hi5 API server.

We welcome you to participate in the future of Hi5 API development.  You can join our new Hi5 API group where you can ask questions and keep abreast of the latest news.

We're pleased to announce our new widget gallery.  Widgets allow you to add all kinds of interesting content to your profile -- slide-shows, games and more.

Show off your photos on your profile by adding a slide show widget, or use the PhotoFX or FunPix widgets to add glitter effects, shadows and crazy hats.  Try a your personalized horoscope and display which countries your profile visitors come from. You can even add great games like Desktop Tower Defense -- all playable right on your profile page!

Adding widgets to your profile is easy.  No knowledge of HTML or widget codes are necessary.  Just click on the Add a Widget button on your profile, select a widget, and customize it.  When you like what you see you add it to your profile.  Removing a widget is just as simple -- just click and it's gone.

All these great widgets are provided by Slide and RockYou. We'll be adding more widgets in the future, so keep checking the hi5 widget gallery often! Let us know what you think, and what you like.

If you're a Widget provider we'd like to hear from you too.  Fill out our contact form and let us know what your plans are.

Another LinuxWorld conference has come and gone.  Many people from Hi5 attended, which just goes to show how important Linux and other Open Source products are for our business.

Hi5's success is based in large part on these high quality open source products.  Our entire site runs using open source software on a Linux platform.  We've found that this provides us with unparalleled flexibility, performance and low costs.

To make Hi5 run we use all of the following products:

• Linux Servers running SuSE Enterprise Linux
• Apache and Lighttpd web servers
• PostgreSQL, a highly scalable database
• Squid for web acceleration
• Resin and Tomcat Java Application Servers
• Struts, our MVC platform
• iBatis - for Object Relational Mapping
  
• Spring - Java Application Framework
  
• Memcached, where we cache as much as possible.
  
• Lucene indexing and search engine
• Enunciate web service deployment framework
  

In addition to being users of these products Hi5 has been more and more active in the community efforts surrounding these Open Source projects.   We've moved beyond mailing list activity and bug reports to actively  contributing code and sponsoring development work.  You can expect more and more of this in the future.

It's all very exciting!  If working with open source projects is your thing then you should definitely check out our careers page.  We'll be talking more about our open source contributions in the months to come, so stay tuned to our blog.

Paul

Update: Lou tells me that we have a few more obscure software components that we enjoy using:

• SiteMesh - Web Page Layout and Decoration Framework.
• StringTemplate - Simple templating engine.
• JRobin - RRDtool for Java
• ImageJ - Image Manipulation toolkit
  

For the last few months, we've all been working hard on the release of a new profile layout. This new layout not only cleaned up and organized the profile page, but provided the groundwork for an exciting new feature: profile skins! Now hi5 members can change the theme of their profile without having to learn code or rely on third-party sites. Our initial skin gallery has everything from gothic and edgy to butterflies and falling hearts.

To get started with this new feature, click "Skin my Profile," which is a new link appearing under the user photo on the profile page. Browse the skin gallery by Most Recent or Most Popular, and try on different skins with the Preview option. Applied skins can easily be changed to a different skin at any time, and profiles can even revert back to hand-coded customization by removing the skin.

For our members with an artistic eye, we have a section to help you create and submit your own skins. Visit the skin gallery and click "Make a Profile Skin" at the top to access the submission form. Be sure to read the guidelines and specifications first! We're looking for high-quality submissions for our gallery and to showcase some of the excellent artists and designers on hi5.

What do you think? We're all very excited about the release of profile skins and have started a group called the hi5 Profile Skins Lounge to answer questions and gather feedback from our members. We want to make skins a great experience for everyone!