Recently in Features Category

To further support hi5's numerous Spanish-language users around the globe, we're pleased to announce our new hi5 Help section in Spanish. All members who are using one of the three Spanish language options we currently have available can now access hi5 Help en Español by clicking on "Ayuda" in the page footer. There, you'll find FAQ articles and the ability to submit inquiries to hi5 Customer Support, as well as receive email responses -- all in Spanish.

This new offering is among many ways we support our Spanish-language customers. After initially translating our service into the most common form of Spanish a couple years ago (making it our first non-English language option), we began offering email-based customer support in Spanish in 2007. Last month, we rolled out two new Spanish language options: Argentina Spanish and Castilian Spanish (with more local/regional dialects of the language planned for the future). With the hi5 Help section now also in Spanish, we're delivering a complete service-to-support Spanish experience for our users who are most comfortable communicating and interacting in this language -- which is the primary tongue of 21 nations around the world and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

We’re excited to announce that the hi5 Skins Gallery has surpassed 1000 published profile skins!

The gallery has come a long way since September, when it totaled just 157 skins by 79 designers. Today, it boasts over 360 designers from 42 nations around the world.

In addition to top themes such as stars, flowers, and grunge, the skin designers are inspired by their national pride, resulting in submissions featuring Colombia, Guyana, and Portugal, to name a few. We also currently have 15 sponsored skins that connect members with their favorite brands and products, like these from Nike and Nokia.

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!

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. 

Russian has recently been added as hi5's 15th language option, and is being used by a quickly growing community of users in the Russian Federation, its emigrants and individuals in countries of the former Soviet Union.

A recent article in eMarketer pointed out that Russia is expected to become the #2 Internet market in Europe — second only to Germany — over the next five years. "Russia, Poland and the other Eastern European countries are the growth drivers for Internet adoption in Europe," wrote eMarketer senior analyst, Ben Macklin.

Russia is actually the world's most commonly spoken Slavic language, a language family that includes Polish, Ukranian, Belarusian, Czech, Serbian, Slovenian, Bosnian, and many others. It is a synthetic language with six cases, posing a non-trivial internationalizationchallenge for us.

To the nearly 300 million who count Russian as a primary or secondary language, hi5 extends its welcome!

hi5 приглашает всех, кто говорит по-русски!

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. 

To thank and support those who have made hi5 the #1 social network in Thailand, and to welcome new hi5 members in this beautiful kingdom, we've now added Thai (ภาษาไทย) to our rapidly growing set of language options.

Thai is currently spoken by an estimated 65 million people. The written language was introduced in 1283 by the third Sukothai period king, Ramkamhaeng, and has undergone little change since its introduction (inscriptions from the Sukothai era can still be read by modern Thai readers).

We’re excited to launch Thai as hi5’s 12th language, and welcome your feedback in the hi5 Thai Language Forum ภาษาไทย. Many thanks to all who have contributed to this latest hi5 translation! ขอขอบคุณทุกท่านที่ให้การสนับสนุน hi5 ภาษาไทย

There are also many more languages to come. If we aren’t already available in your native tongue, suggest a translation in the hi5 Language 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.

We've been busy releasing new features and fixes.   Here's a roundup of some of the latest changes on hi5:

• You'll find a new design for friend updates on your home page and profile pages.  Updates are more concise and organized.
• There's a new 'What's New' system that keeps accurate, real-time counts of your photo comments, profile comments and friend requests.
• The Groups Home Page now highlights your friends groups, so you can find more interesting groups.
• Multi-message delete is now available to anyone with 100+ friends, eventually everyone will get this feature.
• As mentioned already, Hi5 is now localized in Polish.