hi5 (website)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is written like an advertisement.
Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view.
Mark blatant advertising which would require a fundamental rewrite in order to become encyclopedic for speedy deletion, using {{db-spam}}. (May 2008)

hi5

Screenshot of hi5.com's home page
URL	hi5.com
Commercial?	yes
Type of site	Social Networking
Registration	Required
Available language(s)	multilingual
Owner	Sona Networks
Created by	Ramu Yalamanchi
Launched	June 27, 1996
Current status	active

hi5 is a social networking website, which, throughout 2007, was one of the 25 most visited sites on the web.^[1] The company was founded in 2003 by Uday Ranjeet who is also the current CEO.^[2]^[3]

As of April 2008, hi5 claimed to have over 80 million registered members.

1 Features
2 Market share
3 See also
4 References
5 Alternatives
6 External links

[edit] Features

In hi5, users create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown and upload user pictures where users can post comments. hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he or she may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person's friend list and vice-versa.

Some users opt to make their profiles available for everyone on hi5 to view. Other users exercise the option to make their profile viewable only to those people who are in their network. The network of friends consists of a user's direct friends (1st degree), the friends of those direct friends (2nd degree) and the friends of the friends of direct friends (3rd degree).^[4]

[edit] Market share

This map shows the countries where hi5 is the most popular social networking site.

According to traffic data from Alexa.com, hi5 is the #1 social network in over 25 nations across Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. According to traffic data from comScore Media Metrix, hi5 claims to be the third largest social network in the world, although there is little external evidence to back up this claim. hi5 also claims to be the #1 social network for the world's Spanish language population, and the service is available in a total of 23 languages as of April 2008 (including three dialects of Spanish).

However, the site is virtually unheard of in Europe and Northern America, where the market is dominated by Facebook and MySpace.