Developer Platform

Video of hi5's Game Developer Program Session at GDC

2010-03-12T01:31:28Z

hi5 president and CTO, Alex St. John, presented hi5's new Game Developer Program to a standing-room-only audience at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco yesterday. Over 200 social game developers packed the room and spilled into the hallway to learn more about this exciting new program.

For those who weren't able to attend GDC (or for the many who were turned away at the door by Moscone staff and fire marshals), the complete session was captured on video. More information about hi5's Game Developer Program and technology platform is available on our corporate site.

View hi5's Game Developer Program Session at GDC.
View crowd shots.

hi5 Announces Support for Facebook® Compatible APIs

2010-03-04T01:31:15Z

New interfaces minimize integration effort for social game developers

San Francisco, CA; Mar. 2, 2010 -- hi5, the largest social entertainment site focused on gaming, today announced a new set of Facebook® compatible APIs making it easier for social game developers to distribute their games on hi5.com. With the availability of these new interfaces, hi5 will be the largest social site to support both OpenSocial and Facebook compatible APIs, as well as a set of gaming-specific APIs that enable new levels of integration to the social graph for developers.

"As a leading game distribution platform, it's our job to make the process of getting games live on hi5 as easy and seamless as possible for our partners," said Alex St. John, hi5's recently appointed president and CTO. "Now, developers who have designed and developed a social game for Facebook can easily get their game up and running on hi5 with minimal development effort."

hi5's Facebook compatible interfaces, which are currently in use by select partners, support the functionality needed by most social media games to add social elements to their applications, including user authentication, profile pictures, friends, updates and photos. The new APIs also support the JavaScript interfaces necessary to enable user actions such as friend invitations. With this initial set of interfaces, many game developers can take games built for Facebook and run them on hi5 with little or no revisions.

"As a small studio, efficient development is crucial for our business. hi5's Facebook compatible interfaces have allowed us to build applications for both platforms with ease," said Matt Wilson, founder and director of development for Detonator Games. "In fact, we recently brought a game we created for the Facebook Platform onto hi5 with very little modification."

hi5 was among the first social sites to provide support for third-party applications with the launch of its OpenSocial-based developer platform in March 2008. Thousands of developers have built OpenSocial applications that run on hi5, and the company was a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation along with Google, Yahoo! and MySpace. hi5 will continue to support and advance its OpenSocial interfaces.

This effort is the first of many new technologies we will be announcing over the coming months to make hi5 the leading marketplace for great social media games. Alex St. John will be announcing hi5's much-anticipated new Game Developer Program in a dedicated session at the upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 10 at 4:15 p.m.

About hi5

Founded in 2003, hi5 today is among the top 20 largest web sites in the world and the leading destination site focused on social entertainment and gaming. Combining a robust social platform with premium content and game mechanics, hi5 delivers a fun, expressive, and interactive entertainment experience to millions of users around the world. Available in over 50 languages, the site features localized games, virtual goods and other content that is monetized through hi5 Coins, a global virtual currency supporting over 60 payment methods and 30 currencies worldwide. For more information on hi5, visit http://www.hi5.com.

hi5 and the hi5 logo are trademarks of Hi5 Networks, Inc. All other trademarks referenced are the property of their respective owners

Media Coverage

CNET
Inside Social Games
VentureBeat

hi5 to Unveil New Game Developer Program at GDC

2010-02-24T21:28:30Z

Alex St. John, hi5's President & CTO and long-time gaming visionary, will unveil the details of hi5's new Game Developer Program at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This informative, one-hour session will be held on Wednesday, March 10 from 4:15 to 5:15 PM at Moscone Center, Room 122, North Hall. GDC attendees may pre-register for this free event at our events page.

hi5 employees across engineering, marketing and business development will be on-hand to answer questions and explain everything you need to know to get your game distributed to our global audience of over 50 million monthly visitors. hi5's Game Developer Program offers developers:

Free marketing and promotion across the hi5 network for new games launched exclusively on hi5
Revenue share on advertising and commerce using hi5 Coins payment platform supporting over 60 payment methods
A dedicated game portal and game promotional area to facilitate discovery of your game
One-click automatic game installs, so you don't lose users at the installation step
Super-charged social channels which don't artificially cap or limit the ability for your game to go viral.

hi5's new Game Developer Program is a fundamentally different model for social games. We make money with our partners, not from our partners. Come learn more about how your game can go global in this one-hour session.

Note: This event is available to all GDC conference pass holders, except for student passes or audio passes. If you have an Expo pass, a Summit pass, a Conference pass, or an All Access pass, you will be qualified to attend this free event. To pre-register for the event, please visit our events page.

Changes to hi5 Profile for OpenSocial Apps

2009-11-16T23:51:04Z

As you have probably noticed, we are introducing an entirely redesigned user interface for hi5.com. This new release was announced for public beta on October 14, and we have been rolling it out to users worldwide since.

One of the most requested changes from our users was an easier and faster browsing experience. We found that the profile "view" we previously supported, which allowed multiple applications to run from profile pages, was having an adverse effect on performance. So, in this new release, we have replaced the profile view with static images, descriptions, and links to the full "canvas" views of the applications.

We have already seen this change has had a positive impact on site usability and performance. We also believe it will benefit our application partners as well. Previously, users could only have a maximum of 4 applications running on their profiles, which would occasionally compete with each other. Now, users can list as many applications in their profile module as they choose, in a much cleaner, more browse-able fashion.

We expect to be fully deployed with the new release this week.

Hi5 Platform Update - May 2009

2009-04-29T04:53:17Z

As you may have noticed, hi5 has undergone some changes lately. We're refocusing on the social entertainment market. You may have noticed the new hi5 games section and our new virtual currency -- hi5 coins. There are some great new opportunities in this space for the platform, but first The News.

New Platform Features

There have been a number of changes since our last blog post months ago. Here's a quick rundown of what's now available:

Full Portable Contacts and Opensocial REST support.

hi5 always had some great REST support, we've had FOAF and Atom support from the start. We now fully support Portable Contacts and OpenSocial REST APIs. These APIs allow external applications to access much more friend data. New Fields that we support include:

About Me
Addresses (Partner Only)
Books
Emails (Partners Only)
Ethnicity
IMs (Partner Only)
Interests
Languages Spoken
Looking For
Movies
Music
Phone Numbers
Relationship Status
Religion
TV Shows

This is all in addition to our existing set of supported fields including Status, Gender, Birthday, Name and profile photos. All of these obey the hi5 privacy settings. Generally this means if data is public we will return it, if it's friends only we'll return it if both users have the same application. Some sensitive data we are currently only offering to Partners that are willing to align privacy policies. Contact platform-help@hi5.com for more details.

Here are some examples with public data to get you started:

http://api.hi5.com/social/rest/people/87628233/@self

http://api.hi5.com/social/rest/people/87628233/@self?format=xml

http://api.hi5.com/social/rest/people/87628233/@self?format=atom

http://api.hi5.com/social/rest/people/87628233/@self?fields=name,interests,aboutMe,status

http://api.hi5.com/social/rest/people/87628233/@self?filterBy=topFriends

Opensocial 0.9 -- Messaging APIs and more!

The Opensocial 0.9 specification was recently approved. At hi5 we played a major part in this process, including submitting a new Opensocial Messaging API. The messaging API allows for access to all the different types of hi5 messages via REST. You'll find support for public messages (profile comments), private messages (inbox and bulk), sent messages, friend requests, photo comments, and notifications. Depending on the privacy settings your app can access this data. You can easily get an overview of all messages collections with their total and new message count. For partner applications we also allow adding messages, accepting friend requests, marking messages as read and deleting messages.

In addition to this we've already implemented a number of the items for 0.9 in draft format for the hi5 container. You can access these by requiring the feature "opensocial-0.9" in your XML definition file. Note that some of these new features may be unstable. Some great new 0.9 features that you can try are:

New and improved Lightweight Javascript API
Templates and OSML
Simplified App Data APIs

OAuth Support

For some time hi5 has allowed access to our APIs with a Hi5AuthToken cookie or an st parameter on the query string. There's now a better way to do this, OAuth. We now support both two-legged OAuth and three-legged OAuth. This means you don't have to squirrel away tokens and use custom calling code. Instead you can just use OAuth.

Two-Legged OAuth support is available in many of the popular OpenSocial REST libraries. It relies upon the user authorizing your application in hi5 prior to you making a request. To ascertain this is fairly easy, just use a "makeRequest" call to send the userid to your backend server.

Three-legged OAuth is more complex, but allows you to authorize access directly from your remote web site, desktop client or mobile client. In this case you configure your software to request a token, you then direct the user to an authorization page and then control is returned to your software.

To use OAuth you need to know the following important pieces of information:

Consumer Key: Use your application ID, which is a number
Consumer Secret: Use the hi5 API key
Request Token URL: https://api.hi5.com/oauth/requestToken
Authorize URL: https://login.hi5.com/oauth/authorize
Access Token URL: https://api.hi5.com/oauth/accessToken

Once you've authenticated you can then make requests to http://api.hi5.com/social/rest/* endpoints with ease.

The Future

There are a number of exciting features coming to the hi5 platform in the future, especially as it relates to our new Social Entertainment focus. One of the first new features we will support is an OpenSocial-based Virtual Currency API. This will allow OpenSocial Applications to redeem hi5 coins and open up a new monetization channel. And since it's an open standard your redemption code will work on hi5, 51.com and other containers that implement the specification. Currently we are working through a beta test with selected partners. Stay tuned for more on this initiative and other APIs relating to Social Entertainment.

Platform News - November 2008

2008-11-07T00:55:51Z

We've been busy working on the hi5 platform. Recent releases include:

Flash 9/10 Compatibility -- With Adobe's recent release of Flash 10 we noticed a number of security related problems. We've updated our OpenSocial server to send the correct headers for proxied flash content. The API server now has a new crossdomain.xml that will allow for the same level of compatibility as Flash 9.
XRDS Discovery -- You can find our new XRDS-Simple data on http://sandbox.hi5.com. More about this in the near future.
LifeCycle Pings -- We now send user specified parameters with each ping.
OpenSocial Templates -- See http://www.opensocial-templates.org/ for more info.
Other Bug Fixes -- Problems with multipart/form submissions and Accept header issues are now solved.

OpenSocial Developers please take note of the following planned changes:

Apps in the gallery will soon be sorted by engagement. Previously we randomly sorted the top 100 Applications in the category.
Profile pages will only show the users top five applications. Each user can choose which five will appear.

Please feel free to send us feedback on these changes to platform-help@hi5.com

OpenSocial 0.8 Moved To Live Environment

2008-10-07T23:33:30Z

We have now finished the migration of the Platform in production to OpenSocial v0.8. We'd like to thank the developers who helped test 0.8 while it was in beta, as well as those who provided us detailed feedback on the scaling issues we encountered in production last week. We are looking forward to a new wave of application and feature launches on the 0.8 platform. We recently posted an entry highlighting all of the key features of 0.8, the RESTful API being the most significant addition to this standard. Apart from the tremendous contributions to product testing by our QA team and third party developers, our team has also tested 0.8 against Google's OpenSocial compliance application and we're happy to say that it is compliant with most of the recommended test cases.

Additionally, our platform team has been working diligently at responding to your feature requests. This release brought other features into production, some of which had been "in the wild" on our beta servers for about a month and which some developers have already started using:

1. A RESTful API for accessing historical statistics for your apps
2. More attributes in the Person.Field data object
3. A Photo Upload API, auto documented at http://api.hi5.com
4. Status update API that allows you to set the user status

In line with our earlier policies regarding notifications, we are also instituting similar dynamic limits on the total number of emails that an application can send per day. We did this because after adding notifications limits, we saw an improvement in the perception of applications among our users. We will continue to look into ways of striking a balance between user experience for our members and third party developer needs.

If you'd like to ask questions or leave us comments, feel free to send us an email at platform-help@hi5.com, to post on the online forum and to participate in discussions with other developers on the IRC channel. We're dedicated to continuing our efforts to enhance the platform for our members and partners.

Translation Service for OpenSocial Applications on hi5

2008-09-25T21:34:13Z

Reaching a Wider Audience: Community-based Translations for Applications

Hi5 has a large audience in Spanish-speaking markets, Thailand, Romania, Portugal, and many other countries. How much more popular would your application be if it supported Spanish, Thai, Romanian, Portuguese and 50 other languages?

To simplify the translation process for applications, hi5 has connected its OpenSocial development platform to its community-based translation system. For the past six months hi5 has been building teams and language tools to translate the hi5 website into 25+ new languages; now, that same community and toolset is available to OpenSocial developers to translate the applications.

Translations are performed only by users of the application who are members of the hi5 translation team for that language. In addition, developers have complete control over all translations translated text within the system, and may delegate this editorial responsibility to specific translators or reviewers.

Translators have access to the hi5 language tools on the application canvas page. Translations take place in context, directly adjacent to the functioning application.

Developers can preview the translations, perform any required edits, and then publish, making the translation available to all hi5 members. Furthermore, as a developer, you can download the translated text for deployment in any OpenSocial compliant container.

Getting Started

The translation process begins by internationalizing (i18n) the application. The OpenSocial specification is i18n-ready and hi5 provides Internationalization guidelines to help you with this step.

Once the application is internationalized, developers will Reload the application and select to Receive hi5 translations. Developers need to set the application's Default Locale to indicate the language used in the default message bundle. This loads the application's text into the translation system and makes it available to the translators who use the application.

Although the translation teams are most accustomed to translating from English to other languages, as is the case on the hi5 website, the translation tool for applications supports translation from any source language as defined in the hi5 system. This permits maximum flexibility in development and translation.

A new tab has been added to the Development Console, showing the translators' progress. As translations become approved by the community, those languages will appear atop the list with messages indicating New Translations available for download. Exporting the translated message bundle, updating the app xml and reloading the app publishes the new translations.

Additional Resources

For more information on the translation system and processes now available to you, please refer to the following documents:

Developer Guidelines for Translating hi5 Applications - provides an overview of the translation program for OpenSocial applications.
Linguist Guidelines for hi5 Applications - explains the role of the hi5 Linguist in hi5's Volunteer Translation program.
Linguist Instructions for Translating hi5 Applications - provides how-to instructions for Linguists assigned to a hi5 application.
hi5's Internationalization Guidelines - the internationalization section of the hi5 Developer wiki.
OpenSocial Specificiations - Google's OpenSocial home page.

OpenSocial 0.8 In Beta On hi5

2008-08-01T17:05:14Z

Following close behind the release of the OpenSocial 0.8 specification two months ago, we have been hard at work implementing it, and are happy to announce that a beta release is now available to developers. We will be rolling this out to production in the first week of September and would like to give developers ample opportunity to test out our latest implementation thoroughly. The 0.8 version of the specification is completely backwards compatible and we expect that all applications developed on 0.7 will continue to work after the migration.

Possibly the most exciting development in 0.8 is that containers are now required to implement a REST based API according to the RESTful API specification. We hope our implementation will enable developers to build richer server-side, mobile and desktop applications. The complete 0.8 version specification and Release Notes are also available on code.google.com and are a useful read for OpenSocial developers.

To test your application on 0.8, please login to betasandbox.hi5.com with your hi5 account and create an application on the developer console --- you can use your existing application or write a new one. Applications running on betasandbox will access the 0.8 API.

If you find issues please create a ticket using the version "Beta 0.8" in the Developer Center. Please let us know at platform-help@hi5.com if you have any questions.

Statistics API Available on Sandbox

2008-07-30T11:42:52Z

The Statistics API that we announced two weeks ago is available on sandbox. Please use the endpoints described in the earlier post, prefixed with http://sandbox.hi5.com/rest. For example, for the metrics/daily endpoint, you would enter http://sandbox.hi5.com/rest/metrics/daily?.

We look forward to seeing the API being used. Feel free to send us feedback -- we will also propose this shortly as an addition to the OpenSocial REST API specification which will present the community with an additional forum to discuss the API.

hi5 Providing Library For Templates

2008-07-21T16:12:53Z

The hi5.template library is a browser side, Javascript library which enables you to fuse Javascript data and logic into your HTML. It simplifies writing localized apps by providing a message resource tag:

which eliminates the need to build messages and HTML with Javascript. To ease transitioning to language resource files, you can provide the message resource directly in the message tag. For example:

You received a ${gift} from ${friend}

Also, using the hi5.template library allow future compatibility with our user generated content inline-translation tool. The template is straightforward, with only a few conventions:

${} for variable substitution
for iteration
/ for conditional logic, and
for gadget resource localization.

There is also a tag for storing the output of tags, and and

convenience tags.

Check out the wiki for more details on the template library: where to download it, how to specify it within your application and the format for various tags.

Historical Application Statistics Available via APIs

2008-07-18T13:07:27Z

The hi5 Platform Team is continuing to make changes that help developers better understand the growth trends of their products. To this end, we are making application statistics accessible via the API server. Before making this public, we would like your feedback on the design of the API. Please read through these specs and let us know what you think of them!

Developers will have to authenticate themselves by creating an authToken — any of the developer accounts associated with an application can be used to access the stats for an application. Statistics can be generated for all or some of the applications owned by the developer account requesting the data.

The API has three endpoints:

metrics/daily: These are daily stats, not uniq'ed per user. You can query the data for a range of dates, not exceeding 30 days. Requests for more than 30 days will be truncated to 30 days, starting at the start date.
metrics/dailyuniques: These are the same type of stats as returned by metrics/daily, but accounting for uniques. This means that if a single user views a canvas page on your application more than once, it will count as just 1 unique canvas page view in these metrics.
metrics/total: These are total stats calculated for the applications, aggregated since your application launched.

The input parameters are supplied in the URL and the parameters and the acceptable values are all case sensitive. Only the Hi5AuthToken parameter is required

Parameters

metric: If this parameter is not specified, then all available metrics are displayed. You can request the following metrics with this parameter:
1. install: Total number of installs
2. remove: Total number of removes. You will have to subtract this from the total number of installs to get the net installs of your application for the applicable time period.
3. view_profile: Calls to the profile module
4. preview: Calls to the preview module
5. canvas: Calls to the canvas module
6. block: Block requests generated in response to emails and notifications generated by your application_,_ and on the My Applications page.
7. api_request: API requests sent to our API servers by your application
8. report_abuse: Notifications generated by your application marked as spam
9. activity_requested: Requests to generate a Friend Update
10. activity_sent: Friend Update requests fulfilled
11. invite_requested: Friend Invite requests generated. Note that this counts a request containing multiple friends as one request
12. invite_sent: Friend Invite requests fulfilled
13. notification_requested: Notification API requests made to the API servers
14. notification_sent: Notification API requests fulfilled. Note that when an API request is fulfilled, not all the recipients in the API request might receive the request, as some might already have received the limit of per-recipient notifications allowed.
15. all: All of the above
context: The context breaks up each statistic in the metric parameter based on the origin of the corresponding action. Note that not all contexts are valid for all actions — for example, blocks can only occur in the invite, myapps and notification contexts, by definition. If context is not specified then breakdown by context will not be displayed. The possible values of context are:
1. activity_stream: From all links in a Friend Update, if that link is on a user's home page, or from a Friend Update's "More" link if the Friend Update is being viewed on the logged-in user's or someone else's profile.
2. apphome_friend: From the My Applications page of the currently logged-in user, when the user clicks on a recommended application (currently, applications installed by a user's friends)
3. apphome_owner: From the My Applications page of the currently logged-in user, when the user clicks on one of their own applications (currently, user's recent applications)
4. gallery: From the hi5 Application Gallery
5. homepage: From the homepage applications box at the top right of the page
6. invite: From a friend invite
7. myapps: From the Manage Applications page
8. notification: From a notification
9. other_profile: From the profile of someone other than the currently logged-in user
10. own_profile: From the profile of the currently logged-in user
11. profilenav: From the View More link on the Profile module, and from the Applications drop down in the navigation bar at the top of the Profile page
12. unknown: From an unknown context, usually generated when the user comes from a link placed in a Profile module or Friend Update by the application (Note that this number is inflated because invites are not being tracked correctly; this will be fixed soon.)
13. all: All the contexts applicable to a given action
start and end: The start and end dates, respectively, in YYYY-MM-DD format. The dates must be "consistent," that is, the end date cannot precede the start date, and they must both be valid calendar dates. A range greater than 30 days generates an error. If no dates are specified then data for the latest available timestamp (typically, for "yesterday") is displayed.
Hi5AuthToken: The auth token generated via the REST API for your API key and login information.
api_key: The acceptable values are the API keys of the applications owned by the developer making the request; API keys for other applications will generate an error and return no statistics. To return statistics for more than one application (but not all applications) owned by you, specify the api_key parameter multiple times. If no api_key is specified then the one that was used to generate the auth token will be used.

To begin, we will not rate limit this API and expect that the volume will be no higher than once a day per application. Improper use of this API will lead to the offending API keys being blocked from access to this functionality.

We look forward to your feedback. Thanks!

IRC Office Hours Starting Thursday Jun 26

2008-06-25T19:20:58Z

The hi5 Platform Team will be holding Office Hours on the hi5dev IRC channel, twice a week, starting this Thursday. The hours are as follows (all times in PST, which is GMT-7 or GMT-8, depending on the time of the year):

Tuesdays, 9am - 11am
Thursdays, 1pm - 3pm

We are very grateful to developers for the lightning-fast feedback we got via this channel during the early days of the platform, and hope to maintain that spirit of interactiveness as we continue to grow. Please let us know if you have other time preferences and we can consider refining this as we go along.

Instructions for access to the hi5dev channel are available at the hi5 Developer Center. During these hours, at least one member from the team will be logged into the chat room. The Tuesday morning hours are to allow developers from Asia to be able to correspond with us at a time that's reasonable on both sides of the globe.

We were inspired to do this by a similar idea that the Google OpenSocial team had announced quite a while ago --- we would like to give credit where its due.

New Automated Notification Management System - Includes Quotas

2008-06-17T19:48:59Z

One of the attractive features of the hi5 platform is the many viral channels we've made available to allow developers to advertise their applications to our members. The unprecedented success of our platform has demanded that we keep an eye on the flow of notifications and invites to make sure that this opportunity is not exploited by a minority of abusers, thus degrading the experience for our members and making the service unusable for the developer community as a whole. In other words, we are opposed to having spam on hi5; moreover, a flood of irrelevant or misleading notifications drowns out those that come from useful and legitimate applications.

To manage this ecosystem in as efficient a manner as possible, we are introducing a new automated system that will implement notification quotas. To date, we have been moving these switches manually but the communication overhead has been too high. The automated quotas will respond daily to abuse report rates and usage. Specifically, the fewer times our members mark a notification as spam and the more they click through to engage with the application, the more notifications your applications will be able to send.

We think our automated system will help the platform respond in the most timely manner to positive user perceptions of applications and notifications. Very soon, developers will be informed via the response to (rejected) API requests for sending notifications if they are in violation of quotas. We also expect soon to expose the actual quotas on a daily basis via the Developer Console.

If you have any questions about the quota system or suggestions on how else we can support your apps on hi5 while also best serving our membership, please get in touch with us via email, our discussion forums or the wiki --- all contact addresses are available on http://developer.hi5.com.

Heads up for Flash developers: Change in Invite Friends flow

2008-06-12T23:24:27Z

In a update that will go out tonight, we're going to add contact imports in the invite process. This will help developers promote their applications more, as users can invite friends not on hi5 to register and use applications. The new flow will create an AJAX-based pop up on the canvas page (see screenshot below.) Your requests via requestShareApp will also pop up this new UI.

This means that if you use Flash in your application, you need to make sure your application will not render on top of the AJAX box, making it impossible for your users to send invites. To let the invite box show up at the top, you can either:

1. Set the wmode="transparent" on your tag, or

2. Include a if your using an tag.

Please make the necessary changes to your existing applications. We're also making the inclusion of these attributes a mandatory requirement for any new applications submitted to the gallery.