hi5 Archive

This morning we reported on KickApps localization offering. Stan Schroeder at Mashable is now reporting that social network hi5 has announced the launch of their OpenSocial compliant translation tool.

The hi5 translation tool is OpenSocial compliant so it will allow developers who translate their apps on hi5 to lift them and place them onto other OpenSocial-enabled networks. And hi5 is allowing developers to tap into the hi5 free labor/crowdsourced community so that the apps can be translated for nearly free. Seems like a big win for hi5/OpenSocial developers.

Schroeder notes, "This is a good example of why it pays off to be a part of the OpenSocial posse; you create an internationalized application compliant with the standard and you can deploy it on any site that supports it. Of course, Facebook and its platform is now big enough to draw developers regardless of OpenSocial, but these things do make a difference in the long run."

Check out our OpenSocial social network updates from earlier this year.

Social network hi5 has announced that they are acquiring PixVerse. Founder Charles Ying describes PixVerse as, PixVerse is a next generation virtual world company". PixVerse has been part of the hi5 OpenSocial implementation since the beginning and was an early adopter of the Google App Engine Web platform. PixVerse was backed by Venrock. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

We will see more of these application acquisitions as the various application platforms grow. Check out hi5′s OpenSocial updates from earlier this month.

Here’s an video with Ying explaining what Pixverse is, how it works and their usage of OpenSocial:

Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, “want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace.” Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a “featured app” – said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt – he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) – the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

Social network hi5 is out today with some initial stats since the launch of their developer platform and OpenSocial integration. OpenSocial is the Google program to allow developers to create applications that can basically work anywhere with only minor tweaks. The platform officially launched on March 31 and so far there are over 400 new OpenSocial applications running on hi5. In the last two months, 6,000 developers have signed up to develop OpenSocial apps for hi5.

The other stats the company provided include:

• Top apps achieving unprecedented traction, with faster adoption rates than other social networks; hi5 Platform averaging 1M app installs daily
• Half of hi5’s active users engaged with three or more apps installed; most popular apps involve friend interactions, individual/cultural expression and fun  

OpenSocial has been quiet on the blog front lately but as the platforms grow that utilize OpenSocial, we will see more developer chatter and more services utilizing the OpenSocial framework. On a side note, somehow hi5 was left out of the SAI Top 25.

Pingdom is out with their latest stats regarding downtime for the major social networks for the first 60-ish days in 2008. Bebo leads the list with over 12 hours of downtime after their big downtime in January. We wondered if that downtime was due to the rapid expansion of the Bebo developer platform.

Other notables on the list include Friendster with 6 hours of downtime, LinkedIn at 4 hours, Facebook at 95 minutes and LiveJournal at 10 minutes.

As a side note, these type of blog posts from Pingdom are what I try to explain to new startups all the time. Use your tools to show off your tools. This is something I rarely see and, where applicable, should be on every marketing plan.

Social networking site hi5 has launched two new music apps today using OpenSocial through partnerships with iLike and Qloud. hi5 claims more than 70 million worldwide registered members (of course no idea on active) and also notes that these are the first apps using OpenSocial on hi5.

The iLike music application will enable hi5 users to post songs and videos on their profiles. The Qloud My Music application will also now be available to the international hi5 population. By installing the My Music application, users can immediately see and legally play entire songs and videos from their complete iTunes libraries within their hi5 profile.

“We are thrilled to offer artists and fans the ability to connect on hi5, a massive social networking site,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. “Artists can now post songs and videos once via iLike’s Universal Artist Dashboard and reach a potential additional audience of more than 70 million music fans.”

I can only assume that as OpenSocial apps are built on the various social networking platforms, that we will see more and more press releases.