September 2007 Archives

It's been just over 6 weeks since the profile skins feature was released. We've had such a positive response to it, and so many great skin submissions, that we wanted to highlight some of the designers and their accomplishments.

• Design Machine: Laguren blows away the competition with 14 published skins.
• Race for 2nd Place: Erick, Mario Badillo, and Doar Eu have 5 published skins each.
• Stellar Award: Didier's Star Dust skin shows on almost 350,000 profiles and has secured the #1 spot in the gallery.
• One Hit Wonders: Savannah and Serge have only one published skin each, but their submissions reside in the top 10.
• Lounge Loitering: indecent consistently posts and answers questions in the hi5 Profile Skins Lounge, and DJXXX, also an active Lounge contributor, created SKIN MAKERS, a skin help group for Spanish speakers.

The gallery also showcases our first sponsored skin, which was created by Wrigley 5 Gum, and appears on over 17,000 profiles. In all, the skins gallery contains 157 skins by 79 skin designers, with new skins and designers being introduced everyday. Thank you to all the members who have contributed so far, and if you haven't yet, check out the skin gallery!

This past month featured some great improvements to Hi5's language support.  We added our eighth language -- Romanian, and improved our Spanish and French translations.

Romanian is spoken by 24 to 28 million people primarily in Romania and Moldova.  In early 2007 Hi5 was already quite popular in Romania.  After adding the translation traffic and visitors increased significantly.  This moved us into the number 3 position in Romania, right behind Yahoo and Google.  Thanks to all Romanian speakers using Hi5!

At the same time we've spent quite a bit of effort improving our existing translations.  Please welcome Christophe Schuhmann as our new Localization QA Engineer.  Christophe is a native French speaker and has considerably improved the Hi5 "Version Française".  At the same time we've significantly improved the Spanish version.  We think that you'll find the new versions much better, and can expect that new translations will be of the highest quality.

We'll have more exciting language updates soon.  So stay tuned to the Hi5 Blog for more.

Also, we've found that managing our growing number of localizations is a full time job.  If you have experience in this area then consider applying for our Localization Manager position.

Today we've had intermittent performance degradation problems that may have led to you seeing features disabled.  We have managed to work around the problems and bring back site stability.  Our apologies for the disruption you may have experienced.