New hi5 Platform Achieving Significant Adoption; Earning Praise from Developers
· In one month, third-party developers have launched over 400 new OpenSocial™ applications for hi5’s 80 million registered members globally; new developer registrations have tripled since February
· 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
San Francisco, CA; April 29, 2008 – The robust new application development platform of hi5, one of the world’s largest social networks, is already achieving significant adoption success. Since the platform’s launch on March 31, there are hundreds of new hi5 applications, thousands of developers recently registered with hi5, remarkable application engagement among hi5’s diverse global membership, and a record volume of activity on hi5’s OpenSocial™ server implementation.
“We’re off to a great start, and really pleased to see this level of traction so early on,” says hi5 Founder and CEO, Ramu Yalamanchi. “Our platform focus has been on providing the best tools and support for developers, so that they would be able to deliver the most compelling experiences for our users. The momentum we’re already seeing indicates we’re on target for both objectives.”
By leveraging a suite of common APIs, including those of OpenSocial (a community-driven specification for building social applications across the Web), third-party developers have created over 400 new applications for hi5’s users. Sixty-five of the new apps became available when the platform launched on March 31; the remainder added since then, with an average of a dozen new apps per day. The number of developers who have registered to build applications for hi5 users has gone up too – from 3000 in February 2008, to over 9000 today.
Adoption among hi5 users is also high. For instance, half of hi5’s active monthly users are already engaged with the new applications, with an average of three applications per user and about one million new installs daily. The applications attracting the most attention from hi5 users have been those that:
- Involve friend interactions (commenting on friends’ profiles, virtual gifting, planning events with friends, ranking friends, etc.)
- Extend the functionality of popular hi5 features
- Include individual and/or cultural expression, music and games
Some of the new applications are seeing early adoption rates that are higher than developers have achieved with similar apps on other platforms. For instance, there are already over 15 applications that have more than 500,000 installs; with a few that achieved more than a million installs within the platform’s first two weeks — an experience developers say is unique to the hi5 Platform and partly attributable to the numerous user distribution channels hi5 offers for developers’ applications.
This high volume of activity is helping establish hi5 as a pioneer in the use of Shindig, an open source project for sites hosting OpenSocial apps that is run in the Apache Software Foundation incubator. hi5 has processed seven billion requests with Shindig since the platform launched, with an overall traffic peak of more than 7000 requests per second. This validates that Shindig can handle high volume production environments, and further demonstrates the potential and power of the OpenSocial initiative overall.
“We’ve been very impressed with how well hi5 has utilized OpenSocial with their platform, and will be incorporating some of their extensions in the next evolution of the OpenSocial APIs,” says Patrick Chanezon, developer advocate at Google. “The vision of OpenSocial has always been to drive community-based innovation in social applications, and hi5’s platform achievements are encouraging for developers around the world, as they embrace the OpenSocial specification to reach a broad audience across the social Web.”
What Developers Are Saying…
- “With my events application, TheVerb, I’m seeing much better growth on hi5 than MySpace,” says Suhail Doshi, an independent developer. “I have also found that the hi5 Platform team is very accessible, listens well to the feedback of developers, and has implemented the most advanced OpenSocial platform to date.”
- "hi5's large user base has helped make iLike the largest and fastest-spreading social music service, and also expands the reach of the iLike 'post-once-publish-everywhere' platform for artists,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. “We’re pleased to soon be offering two of our most popular features, music dedications and video playlists, to the hi5 community.”
- “The hi5 Platform is really fertile ground for our applications, because there is little-to-no crossover with our users on Facebook and MySpace,” says Mark Otero, KlickNation founder. “We have also developed some fun new applications exclusive to hi5, such as Kiss, which has quickly gained hundreds of thousands of users in multiple nations. We’re definitely seeing the benefits of having apps on the #1 social network in 26 countries.”
- "Our real-time chat applications, Pix Chat and Pix Wall, are seeing insanely great success on hi5!" says Charles Ying, PixVerse founder. "Our apps are growing three orders of magnitude faster than expected. hi5 is the place to be!"
- "It's amazing to see how quickly MyCauses has been embraced by hundreds of thousands of users in the hi5 community,” says Fariz Chowdury, an independent developer. “It's far beyond anything possible on MySpace, thanks to hi5's adoption of the viral features of the OpenSocial platform. It's allowed me to focus less on promotion, and more on making the application better."
- "We commend hi5 for creating the fastest growing social application platform we've ever seen,” said Lance Tokuda, CEO and co-founder of RockYou in a recent press release his company issued about their app success on hi5. “RockYou is committed to enriching the already engaging experience that hi5 provides to its growing base of users."
- “We’ve developed an application called iThink, a meeting place where people share opinions with friends and others from around the world. It’s available on Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and now hi5, where we’re expecting significant growth given hi5’s strong international reach and minimal overlap with the other networks,” says Alex Gault, marketing director for Minekey. “The hi5 team has done a great job with the launch of their platform, and as a result, we experienced a smoother launch for iThink on hi5. The user experience is way better too.”
More Information
Third party developers interested in building applications for hi5 will find detailed information at http://developer.hi5.com/. To join hi5 and create a free member profile, please visit hi5.com. Once a member, the new OpenSocial applications can be previewed and installed via the hi5 Applications catalog, which is accessible from a user’s hi5 homepage and profile.
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