Hi5 Goes Mobile and Takes on the World
The internationally popular social network Hi5 launched a mobile version (m.hi5.com) of its website this week. The mobile website will allow Hi5 users to send and receive messages, add / request new friends, view friend’s profiles and make comments and also view the real-time status of other members online. With support for 26 languages, Hi5’s mobile website targets the growing number of international users, who unlike their American counterparts, are more likely to use a mobile device to access the internet than a PC. Creating this “culturally relevant” social network and providing it to the world has been Hi5’s strategy and it has worked. According to ComScore, hi5 grew 79% in the first half of 2008 with the number of unique visitors increasing from 31.4 million in December 2007 to 56.4 million in June 2008. That is more than twice the growth rate of any of the other top 10 social networks! Keep those rates up and they will be poised on the cusp of world domination.
Tags: comScore, growth, hi5, internet, mobile, social networking
I’ve never heard of hi5. Sounds like a myspace/facebook knockoff that will go no where and then disappear within a year.
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LOL I used to have Hi 5 a while ago. Man I thought they closed shop. I guess not…
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my wife uses hi5. Here it’s mostly myspace and right below that is facebook. However in other countries it’s seems that hi5 is the dominent one, in Latin America at least. They didn’t even know what I was talking about when I told them about myspace.
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the best thing that hi5 has going for them is their international audience, especially in latin america, as fernando mentions above. Royal Pingdom did a recent study showing the popularity of the top 12 social networks grouped by country:
http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=336
it is interesting to see geographically where each social network is dominant.
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Hi5 is so much better than myspace and facebook. It’s more user friendly.
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