What is Hi5?

Hi5 was created in 2003, founded by Ramu Ralamanchi, who is also CEO of the hi5.

As with most social networking sites, you create a hi5 profile online where you complete some information about your hobbies and interests amongst other things.  You can invite others to join of become friends, upload images and post comments.  It’s real focus however is in the gaming market and this is where it has seen it’s greatest success.

Hi5 gives users a profile page which includes their name, gender, location and a profile picture. Users must be 13 or over, but obviously there’s no way to verify a member’s age. On sign up, the site strongly encourages users to import their friends from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and and AOL Mail – so strongly, in fact, that it’s hard to skip this process.

Hi5′s Facebook compatible interfaces, which are currently in use by select partners, support the functionality needed by most social media games to add social elements to their applications, including user authentication, profile pictures, friends, updates and photos. The new APIs also support the JavaScript interfaces necessary to enable user actions such as friend invitations. With this initial set of interfaces, many game developers can take games built for Facebook and run them on hi5 with little or no revisions.