Hi5 Developer Platform Follows In Facebook Footsteps
10/05/2007, 10 months 4 weeks ago
The launch of the Facebook Platform led to a massive increase in Facebook's user base, not to mention a slew of applications that developers are hoping will manage to generate some kind of revenue.
Since that launch, several other social networks, such as MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn, have kept a watchful eye, with some making plans for their own development platforms.
Today, Hi5 looks to be the next social network to follow the example that Facebook has set, with their own platform for developers, as company representatives announced at the CommunityNext conference for application developers for social networking platforms.
Back in August, Hi5 quietly unveiled an API which seems to have gone largely unnoticed, possibly because the selection is somewhat limited. Could this platform be what Hi5 needs to continue its growth?
According to VentureBeat, Hi5 executives are currently getting feedback from users and third party developers on how to best prepare the platform. The current widget gallery at Hi5 offers primarily widgets from Slide and RockYou to allow users to add custom slide shows and special effects to profiles.
Hi5 is already comparable to Facebook in terms of users with 35 million, but most of those are outside of the US, which happens to be Facebook's weak area. Eric Eldon made a good point when mentioning that Hi5 is probably most known for reconnecting immigrants in new countries with long-lost friends and family members back home. “Such differences between user bases have an impact on what sort of applications are developed for the respective platforms. Its easy to imagine a Hi5 application, for example, that lets users find other people from their hometowns who now live in their new community.”
With that said, I could easily see the Hi5 developer platform being very successful. Don't sit up waiting for this platform's launch however, as Hi5 has given themselves 12 months to create a product ready for general use.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!
funny, i didn’t even mention hi5 in this article that i wrote for you guys - they feel like a very “me too” kind of site…the user base is nothing to ignore, but there’s so much overlap with the users of these networks…
perhaps profy could run a survey of some kind to “guesstimate” how many duplicate users there are - meaning how many exist on one or more of the networks - with one or more profiles - is this something you’d consider doing?
That’s a good idea.
Another thing I was wondering about is what percentage of Hi5 users are actively logging in daily.
In my post about Facebook’s potential music store, I mentioned Techcrunch’s statement that 50% of Facebook users login daily, which I am sure helps account for the massive growth of the Facebook Platform.
Dave, it’s an interesting idea, really and I’m sure such data would be very useful to many bloggers/professionals. I can hardly understand right away what tools we could use but it could be done, I think - an interesting survey it could have been.
But the problem is that Profy’s audience is a bit more professional for that since Profy is usually read by people that actually work in the web industry - thus they often are on many (if not all) social networks because they need them all for business. For example, I have accounts with at least 30 various social networks and I only use 5 of them, I think. And this is pretty true for many of our readers.
I believe that such a survey could better be performed by Mashable - this is the blog that is aimed at social networkers, not the professionals working in the field. Besides, they have their own network they could use for the survey.