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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?<parameters>.

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.