Hi5 | Social Network At Its Finest

Hi5 is yet another name in the sea of social networking websites that thrives in the internet nowadays. It is often times seen as a MySpace clone which is, in a big part, true, but hey, what else are not MySpace clones?

In the Web 2.0 arena, there is nothing a website can do that has not already been done by similar websites. As for Hi5, its only significant difference from MySpace is its name and the whole point of having the name. That would be being able to give your friends—and you guess it right—a high-five.

So what exactly should we expect from Hi5? Nothing much other than what we have seen so far. But mind you, these are all good stuff anyway so, really, there is no use complaining. At least they provide easy registration for the benefit of those who are still new with the social networking community (well, if those people still exist).

It is also great that Hi5.com provides members with myriad ways to have fun. You can choose from a wide range of activities you can do with your real life friends and relatives or with your cyber friends, both old and new. You can join groups you think you belong with based on your education, location, beliefs and interests. You can upload photo albums and have them commented by your friends. You can also upload videos to share with your friends or create a playlist of your favorite songs to enjoy it with them.

Hi5 is also a good test of your creativity skills. It provides lots of choices for profile design customization. If you don’t have that much skill, you can simply choose a template color combination that fits your personality. You can also upload an image from your computer and make it as your profile background. If you know a few HTML, then Hi5 is a great way to apply those skills in creating fun and eye-catching profiles.

However, there are some other drawbacks in Hi5 that is worthy of a few discussions. For one, there is not much option for you to view profiles anonymously and privately as you can see all the people who is viewing your profile. The search option is quite limited and odd. You can only search names by country so the results are not filtered very well. Unlike MySpace and other social network sites, Hi5.com offers a very few widget selections. Well, this is probably attributed to the fact that Hi5 does not really advertise that much which, in a way, is a relief to those who does not want their profiles flooded with unnecessary information.

Being the 5th most popular social network and 11th most popular website all over the world (with only MySpace and Orkut.com as the other two social network ahead on the list), Hi5 is continuously developing the website by launching a platform for developers so that they can add applications to cater its 50 million profiles. Hi5.com recently joined Google’s OpenSocial platform to maintain this.

Link | Hi5.com

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