hi5

Social network Hi5 plans to announce on Thursday that it has built a developer application with the Google-created OpenSocial standard that "crowdsources" language translation.

This makes it possible for OpenSocial-compatible social networks or applications to let their users work to translate a site or application's text and interface into more languages, in turn making it easier for the service to have broader geographic reach. The translation app will be implemented on Hi5, a social network that was founded in San Francisco but is most popular in Spanish-speaking countries, as well as its own developer platform, and is … Read more

Hi5 is one of the world's largest social networks, with over 56 million monthly visitors. It's a company that demands maximum scale and performance from its infrastructure.

As such, it's no surprise that Hi5 recently opted to go with PostgreSQL as supported by EnterpriseDB.

PostgreSQL? Isn't that an open-source database? It can handle that load?

Indeed.

Hi5 runs hundreds of PostgreSQL servers in one of the world's largest commercial OLTP PostgreSQL installations. All Hi5 subscriber data, including user profiles, metadata associated with user photos, and comments, is stored on the company's PostgreSQL databases...In June 2008, the PostgreSQL-based system delivered more than 18.5 billion page views, serving nearly 11 million visitors to the site every day.

A key challenge and requirement for Hi5 is that the social-networking site cannot be taken offline for maintenance. The company's PostgreSQL databases must deliver exceptional stability and performance 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year to serve users around the globe. Any issues must be resolved in real time, with the system still running.

That's extreme performance, and stands as a continued testament to open source and its increasingly routine ability to deliver significant performance at a lower cost, just as Red Hat announced earlier today in its Linux benchmarks.

However, the real story in Hi5's decision is its work with EnterpriseDB. The Web 2.0 world has traditionally adopted open source heavily...and paid little to nothing for it. Hence, the real news here is one Web 2.0 company's realization that buying support for open-source software makes a lot of sense/cents.… Read more

The biggest social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, have operated mobile sites long before anyone ever held an iPhone. Midsize social networks are still warming up to the concept: Hi5, a San Francisco-based company that counts its biggest following in Latin America, formally launched Hi5 Mobile on Tuesday.

The social site has launched its mobile edition in 26 different languages, a testament to its multicultural image, and has optimized it for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and select handsets from manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung. Those translations, Hi5 says, are done on the part of locals rather than the company to make … Read more

On November 1, 2007, Google launched OpenSocial, a set of APIs that leverage JavaScript and HTML for creating applications that access friends and update feeds from any compliant social network. Nearly 10 months later, Google is touting the maturation of the OpenSocial specification and growing developer and user adoption.

At this juncture OpenSocial version 0.7 has an addressable market of more than 300 million social network users, including the social networks that have delivered OpenSocial applications or are actively developing them, according to Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management. Friendster, which claims 75 million users including 55 … Read more

Some people might be embarrassed if their friends found an old copy of Mr. Big's "To be with you" or Paula Abdul's "Cold hearted (snake)" stashed away in their CD collection. But not EMI. They own those songs, and they want the world to know it.

The music giant is suing social-networking site Hi5, video advertising start-up VideoEgg, and 10 unnamed defendants for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of those and hundreds of other pop throwbacks.

The lawsuit alleges that Hi5 users have uploaded and disseminated hundreds of music videos the company owns rights … Read more

Social network Hi5, founded in the San Francisco Bay Area but most influential in Latin America, announced Monday that the application program interface (API) for its developer platform is now live. This means that, as with other social networks that have opened up their code, third-party developers can create applications for the site.

More than 7,700 developers and development companies have already signed on to create apps for Hi5, which has 80 million registered users. (Note that the 80 million refers to total user accounts, not necessarily active ones.)

Hi5's platform is compatible with the OpenSocial standard initiated by Google, … Read more

Now that Yahoo has finally and officially signed on to the OpenSocial API bandwagon (see Techmeme), the company that Microsoft might buy has joined with MySpace.com and Google to create the OpenSocial Foundation. Facebook is still missing in action, considering whether joining the OpenSocial Foundation is in the best interests of its membership--or its own platform.

OpenSocial provides a useful piece of functionality, solving a developer problem by allowing applications developed with the APIs to run on different services without modification--write once, play many. A photo-sharing application could tap into the social graphs of Orkut, Bebo, MySpace, Ning, or … Read more

Have you gotten sick of the word "platform" yet? Sorry.

According to a post on TechCrunch, MySpace.com is planning to follow in Facebook's footsteps and open up a set of application program interfaces (APIs) so that developers can create "MySpace apps" in the vein of Facebook apps.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who apparently got the details from developers who have been consulted on the project, wrote that we may be seeing this as early as next week--potentially at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

More specifically, this is allegedly going to be … Read more

Statistics house ComScore released some numbers on Tuesday pertaining to how quickly a handful of popular social-networking sites are growing worldwide, and which ones dominate in which regions of the globe. There's nothing all too notable here, as the global reach of various social-networking sites has been well-documented already--and even mapped. But it's always cool to see numbers, which I suppose is why companies like ComScore exist in the first place.

The main set of numbers tracks worldwide social-networking growth, with June 2006 and June 2007 as the benchmarks, for seven services: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, … Read more