Google Data

Posted by Lou Moore, hi5 Director of Engineering

I’m here to share some exciting news from hi5...

Today we launched a robust new application development platform that enables developers in the OpenSocial community to more easily create, deeply integrate and increase the success of their applications on hi5. As a leading international social network (#1 in over 20 nations), the 8th most-trafficked website in the world, and with less than 25% active user overlap with any of the other leading social networks, hi5 presents a significant growth opportunity for developers’ applications — particularly given the many viral channels we’ve provided to support adoption of your apps. We hope you will contact us soon to get your apps on hi5, or build from scratch on our platform. You can also reach our platform team on this IRC chat channel: irc://irc.freenode.net #hi5dev.

(The new hi5 Application Directory)
In addition to the platform launch, hi5 also announced today that our company will be joining Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to help establish the OpenSocial Foundation. As many of you know, we have been a proponent of the OpenSocial initiative from the beginning, and are now simply taking our commitment to the next level. We look forward to working with many of you in this endeavor.

In the meantime, we’d like to extend thanks to all of the developers who have been hard at work preparing applications for our platform launch. There are so many that we can’t list them all here, but we sincerely appreciate your contribution! In fact, we are all very excited at hi5 about the many new ways your applications will enable our users to communicate, interact and have fun on hi5, as well as across the social web.