Recently in Announcements Category

On Monday, hi5 launched its new Developer Platform with an initial batch of 65 new applications for hi5 users. We began making these apps available to hi5 users in phases throughout the week, and are now pleased to announce that all 80 million hi5 members now have access to our new Application Directory. In it, there are over 150 new ways to enjoy hi5, with many more to come!

Today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of hi5, as we have launched a robust new developer platform that will help bring about many new ways to communicate, interact and have fun within the hi5 community. Now, developers of social networking applications will be able to more easily create, deeply integrate and increase the success of their applications on hi5, by leveraging a suite of common APIs, including those of OpenSocial.

hi5 has also announced today that our company will be joining Google, Yahoo! and MySpace to help establish the OpenSocial Foundation. This new non-profit organization is being formed to focus on advancing the neutrality and longevity of an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the Web, hence the name OpenSocial. What this commitment ultimately means for us is more ways for you to enjoy hi5!

I'm here to share breaking iLike news with the hi5 community...

Starting today through March 26, R.E.M.'s highly anticipated new album, Accelerate, is available to listen to in its entirety by hi5 users who have added the iLike music application. R.E.M. chose iLike to debut their new album before it will be available anywhere else. If you use iLike on hi5, you now have exclusive access to:
 

• Full song streams from R.E.M.'s 14th studio album
  
• A video message in which R.E.M.'s frontman, Michael Stripe introduces and discusses the album

Accelerate is intense and relevant — with songs inspired by the WTO riots in Seattle, the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and other topical themes. As Michael said in our press release: "Collaborating with iLike, and debuting Accelerate across the Web is in keeping with the spirit and immediacy of the album. Accelerate is our turbo-charged response to the times we live in."
 
We hope you enjoy our first-ever Worldwide Listening Party.

New iLike Features for hi5 Users
Almost four million users have added iLike to their hi5 profiles since we launched three months ago! Now, we're gonna make the service even better in the next few weeks, by adding two of your most-requested features...

• Song dedications: dedicate and send songs to your friends, with a personalized message
• Music video playlists: create personalized music video playlist on your hi5 profile page

Enjoy the R.E.M. Worldwide Listening Party, and tell your friends about iLike on hi5!

Note to Musicians: If you aren't already using iLike's Universal Artist Dashboard™ to conveniently share music, videos and concert dates with more than 23 million iLike users across the Web, you can get started now by clicking here. 

As we rolled out simplified and traditional Chinese, you may have noticed that we added a new globe icon in the hi5 language navigation (see upper right hand corner of the hi5 homepage). We offer hi5 in so many languages now, they don’t all fit on one line anymore! So, we’ve added the globe icon to support an ever-expanding menu of language options.

Looking ahead…

Over the next six months, we’ll be adding new languages every month, and have other exciting features to make hi5 locally and culturally relevant coming as well. To take an active role in the fun, please visit, join and participate in our Language Forum.

 

In time for Chinese New Year (新年快乐!), we’ve added simplified and traditional Chinese as hi5’s newest translations. Over 1.2 billion people use these two written languages – making them so common, they were a perfect fit for our growing Asian offering.

“Chinese” is actually a collection of many diverse dialects including Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Min, Xiang, Hakka, and others. While Mandarin (the official language of China) is most often written in the simplified Chinese script, we provide the traditional Chinese script as well — to make hi5 readily available for as many Chinese-language Internet users as possible.

China has actually surpassed the United States in Internet usage, with over 150 million users spending nearly two billion hours online each week and a steady growth rate of 18% annually (see related Forbes article). With the addition of the Chinese scripts, we look forward to welcoming many new hi5 members in China, as well as those in other locations where the language is regularly used, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, and more.

欢迎全世界的华人！

With the new year comes many new hi5 features! Here’s an overview of our latest rollouts:

Online Now: Ever wonder which of your friends are on hi5 at the same time as you? Now you'll know with the new Online Now feature. Any friends simultaneously using the site will be listed on the left-hand side of your homepage.

Status: Let your friends know what you're up to and see what's going on with them with the new Status feature. Located right on your homepage, it’s a quick and easy input box for updating folks on your current status, mood or personal statement. What’s particularly cool: the old “Scrapbook Topics” has been merged in with the new Status feature, so your friends can let you know what they think about the Status you’ve posted.

Photo Ordering:

By popular demand, we’re also happy to announce there's a brand new page for managing photo albums. Set your album cover, or re-order and delete photos all through one simple drag and drop interface. Check out the updated new look on the photo pages too.

Bulk Inbox: You've spoken and we listened....so you'll be able to easily access all of your most important messages from your friends in your hi5 Inbox, without any clutter from non-friends (those messages will fall into the new Bulk Inbox).

Profile Updates: Fives now has its own module on the profile, above Comments on the right side of the page. We also moved Schools and Workplaces up into the top area.

Profile Invisible to Blocked Users: In our ongoing efforts to maintain your privacy, we're preventing any user you've blocked from seeing any of your profile pages. Goodbye unwanted glances – hello friends!

And that’s just the beginning of the exciting releases we have to come. We hope you enjoy them, and let us know what else you’d like to see on hi5 in our “How Can We Make hi5 Better” discussion forum. 

hi5 has announced the launch of two new music services through collaborations with iLike and Qloud. iLike and Qloud each launched an application on hi5 by leveraging the common set of OpenSocial™ APIs to deliver new music services to hi5’s more than 70 million registered members — making these the first applications using OpenSocial to go live on hi5.

Hi5 is pleased to add Japanese (日本語 / にほんご) to our growing set of supported languages. Japanese is spoken by 130 million people, mostly in Japan, but is also commonly studied in Korea, China, Australia, and The United States.

Being the first Asian language for hi5, Japanese presents a unique challenge to the design and localization teams.  Three different scripts are used for the written language: kanji (漢字 かんじ), which are derived from Chinese in the 6th century, plus two syllabic scripts, hiragana (平仮名 ひらがな) and katakana (片仮名 カタカナ). Keeping them all straight was quite a challenge!

Japanese is our eleventh language with many more to come.  Please visit the Hi5 Language Forum for more information about our translations and localization.

We're pleased to announce the hi5 Developer Center.  This site is an essential resource for people developing applications that use the hi5 Platform.  Here you will find:

• The latest news about hi5 application development.
• Our latest Platform Roadmap.
• Full API documentation for the hi5 Platform.
• Our Platform Developer discussion group.
  
• Code Samples, Tips and more...

With this information everyone, from hobbyists to our largest partners, can easily develop for the hi5 Platform using a multitude of languages and protocols.  So whether you're developing the next great web gadget or a cool mobile application, visit us and join in the conversation.

Hi5 is pleased to add Turkish (Türkçe) to our growing set of supported languages.  Turkish is spoken by 65–73 million people worldwide.  The absence of gender and the latin script made this one of our easier translations.

This is our tenth language with many more to come.  Please visit the Hi5 Language Forum for more information about our translations and localization.