Hi5 is founded by Ramu Yalamanchi and he is the current CEO of Hi5.
Hi5 has its headquarter in San Francisco, United States, it has gained popularity especially in Latin America.
The website is available currently in 15 languages.
It also has 35 million unique website visits every month according to Alexa.
This website is number 1 or 2 most trafficked website in a dozen countries.
The Hi5 website is growing faster month by month and showing an increase of 15% per month.
Development: Hi5 has become a widely used social networking website and offers profile customization to the registered users.
Hi5 was chosen as the third most popular social networking website by comScore according to monthly page views and as of January 2009, this website claims it has over 60 million members.
Current usage: Since its launch in 2003, Hi5 is more popular in the Latin America and currently enables its users to join chat rooms, groups and also they can customize their profiles with variety of themes and backgrounds.
While this is among top 10 websites in the world, it is not in top 50 websites in the US and was a great social networking website for those who live in Central America.
The website is named Hi5 as you can give your friends a High-Five.
The high-five is much similar to rating, you can give as warrior fives, crush fives, swank fives and many more.
Future developments: There are number of features we can expect from Hi5 in future.
The most awaited features or developments are:
- Better User Interface: The interface of this website can be improved in the future.
- Privacy options and security: The present privacy and security options needs to be improved in the future.
Hi5 also allows to discover your old friends through search.
If you don't want to show your profile to anonymous users,privacy options can be set to make your profile as private.
Private profiles can only be viewed by your friends.
You can store your photos using photo albums.
Through this you can share your photos to your friends.
Privacy options can also be set for your photo albums.
Technical explanation: Registration is required in order to use this website.
After you login you can fill basic information about you.
This information appears on your profile.
The "Friend Finder" tool through which you can filter according to gender, status (married or single), country and age.
You can add other members as your friend by clicking on Add as Friend link in that user profile.
This sends a message to that user to confirm you as his friend.
Hi5 allows to invite or make friends from your Yahoo mail, Gmail and AOL.
Hi5 searches for friends from your email contacts whether they are on the network.
Photos can be uploaded by clicking on Photos link.
You can categorize your photos into albums.
Privacy options can be applied to photo albums so that only your friends can view them.
You can send a message to other user or your friend using scrapbook.
Worldwide usage: Hi5 based in US has gained popularity in Latin American countries.
The full-scale localization strategy applied by this website has helped the site to gain more members and presently the user interface is offered in 20 regional languages worldwide.
This social networking website offers its users localized experience to its members helping them to connect based on language or culture.
Over 50 million unique users every month, this is the number one social networking website in 25 countries across the world.