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!

Today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of hi5, as we have launched a robust new developer platform that will help bring about many new ways to communicate, interact and have fun within the hi5 community. Now, developers of social networking applications will be able to more easily create, deeply integrate and increase the success of their applications on hi5, by leveraging a suite of common APIs, including those of OpenSocial.

hi5 has also announced today that our company will be joining Google, Yahoo! and MySpace to help establish the OpenSocial Foundation. This new non-profit organization is being formed to focus on advancing the neutrality and longevity of an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the Web, hence the name OpenSocial. What this commitment ultimately means for us is more ways for you to enjoy hi5!

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. 

Each year, Webware.com hosts the Webware 100 awards to recognize "the best Web 2.0 sites, services and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation." Thousands of nominees are mulled over by the Webware editors (led by veteran tech journalist and CNET Editor-At-Large, Rafe Needleman), who then put the finalists up for public vote.

That's where you come in. This year, hi5 is a Webware 100 finalist. We're up against 29 other contenders in the Social category, and the polls are now open through March 31. You can cast your vote here.

Thanks in advance for those votes cast our way!

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!

As we rolled out simplified and traditional Chinese, you may have noticed that we added a new globe icon in the hi5 language navigation (see upper right hand corner of the hi5 homepage). We offer hi5 in so many languages now, they don’t all fit on one line anymore! So, we’ve added the globe icon to support an ever-expanding menu of language options.

Looking ahead…

Over the next six months, we’ll be adding new languages every month, and have other exciting features to make hi5 locally and culturally relevant coming as well. To take an active role in the fun, please visit, join and participate in our Language Forum.

 

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！

For the second year running, media firm AlwaysOn is recognizing the top 100 emerging companies that are demonstrating 'game-changing' innovations in marketing, branding, advertising and public relations. Known as the OnMedia Top 100, this year hi5 is among the honorees within the "Community Platforms" category.  

To make the cut, hundreds of private companies were nominated and judged based on AlwaysOn’s five primary evaluation criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value creation, and media attention. Among those who weighed in to determine the honor roll: KPMG, Bridge Bank, Merrill Corporation, Manatt, Phelps & Philips, and the AlwaysOn editors.

In a congratulatory message to hi5, AlwaysOn founder and CEO, Tony Perkins said, "The nominations were extremely competitive and...the level of excellence in the top 100 was remarkable. These companies are proving to have significant innovation, substantial customer adoption, large market potential, noticeable buzz, and are well on their way to creating tremendous value for their investors."

We appreciate the kudos Tony, and are pleased to be included in this distinctive group.