hi5 (website)

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hi5
Screenshot of hi5.com's home page
URL	hi5.com
Alexa rank	15 [1]
Commercial?	yes
Type of site	Social Networking
Registration	Required
Available language(s)	Multilingual
Owner	Sona Networks
Created by	Ramu Yalamanchi
Launched	June 27, 2003
Current status	Active

Hi5 is a social networking website, which, throughout 2007, was one of the 25 most visited sites on the web (among people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser.^[1]) The company was founded in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanchi who is also the current CEO.^[2][3] As of February 2008, hi5 claimed to have over 70 million registered members^[4]

Contents [hide] 1 Features 2 Market share 3 See also 4 References

[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).^[5]

[edit] Market share

Hi5's advertising claims it to be the third largest social network in the world, a claim that is consistent with Alexa's popularity rankings for social networking websites [2].

Although created and headquartered in the United States, it is more popular in other countries, being ranked 16th in the world among people who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser [3], which makes it the third most popular social networking website worldwide after Facebook (5th) and MySpace (7th), but only 83rd in the US [4].