Many Channels for hi5 Platform Info -- Twitter, IRC, Wiki & More!

Our team had plenty of work last week helping the platform respond to the tremendous growth we've seen in the recent past. We really appreciate the patience and support of all the developers who are working hard to create applications for our 80 million members globally. If you are one of these developers -- thank you!

We believe we are now in better shape to handle the high load conditions we saw previously (and expect will continue with the ongoing success of our platform). An important learning for us was to maintain multiple communication channels with developers to provide up-to-the-minute updates and other valuable hi5 information, whether through our IRC channel, discussion forum or this blog. More recently, we've also added a Twitter account to our portfolio of communication tools, and a couple rounds of temporary down times have already been twittered (tweeted?) over the last couple of days.

Next week, we'll add yet another way of communicating with us and with each other. Specifically, we will be opening up the wiki on our Developer Center website to enable collaboration. If you have any suggestions for the structure of and navigation between the developer-accessible pages (such as posting sample code, creating feature request pages, interacting with our users to know what apps to build, etc.), please do let us know.

Beyond communication with the developer community, another focus for us has been on setting fair standards for application notifications. Our users expect applications on hi5 to behave according to the high standards we've set for other features of our service, which among other things means that installing applications will not overwhelm their in boxes with irrelevant or misleading information. We've applied over four years of learning into the guidelines we set for creating effective and useful viral channels for our service, and are continually evolving our developer guidelines to inculcate these learnings, while also reacting to the fluid nature of the application landscape. Please check out the latest updates to our guidelines, if you haven't already. We welcome your feedback.