The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘hi5’

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Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.

The first one, which we featured in June 2009, already painted a picture of Facebook taking over the world from the West, but the second one shows its relentless colonization even more clearly.

Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.

Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future.

Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013.

Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam).

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If there’s been one shining star on social network applications platforms, it’s been casual gaming: Zynga is rumored to be making an absolute killing with their games, and Mochi Media’s unified Flash payment platform has shown some very impressive early results. Now hi5, one of the world’s most popular social networks, is looking to capitalize on the trend. On Wednesday, the social network will be launching a totally revamped site that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system. The site won’t go live for everyone for a few days, but you can check it out now at http://new.hi5.com.

The new hi5 still retains many of the same key features you’ll find on any social network — your profile consists of a photo or avatar, you can browse through your friends, and so on. But there’s clearly a much bigger emphasis on the site’s games and virtual currency (called ‘Coins’) than there was in the past. In the old design, the Games link was buried in the header, which also included links to Photos, Messages, Applications, and more. Now Games and Coins are both featured just as prominently as the link to your Profile and Friends. If it isn’t the first thing people will click on, it’s probably the second.

Alongside the new emphasis on gaming, hi5 is launching an avatar system called hi5 Stars, which features Flash-based animated 3D avatars (no download required). You’ll be able to change the appearance and movements of these to fit your current status, which anyone will see when they visit you profile. There really isn’t much you can do with them at this point, but down the line hi5 will be using these as part of its social entertainment experience, in much the same way Nintendo has done with the Wii’s Mii system, we’re told. This means that you will likely be able to use your avatar in some games, which is sure to be a crowd pleaser.

Hi5 is not especially popular in the United States compared to Facebook, but it’s quite popular abroad, with over 60 million monthly unique visitors (only 10% of which come from the US). This would normally pose a challenge to developers who would have to figure out how to engage in transactions with users around the world, but hi5 has that taken care of. The social network has set up 60 different payment systems for users worldwide, all of which convert to hi5 Coins. And aside from the benefits of making international payments relatively painless, virtual currencies tend to lead to more impulse buying (it’s much easier to toss away a few Coins than a few dollars). hi5 takes a rev share of the money spent that varies by game, usually around 50/50 or 70/30 in the developer’s favor.

Even before the redesign hi5 games section has been doing very well. It only launched in February and already accounts for around 1/3 of the site ’s traffic, and direct user payments through the game already account for 15% of hi5’s revenue. Expect to see that number jump substantially over the next few months.

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Social network hi5 is launching an instant messaging service, hi5 IM, adding real-time interaction for users. hi5 IM, which is similar to Facebook Chat, Facebook’s instant messaging feature, shows users which friends within their network are online and runs directly in any hi5 user’s browser. In addition to one-on-one chat, users can change their status, write updates, post profile comments, and share photos through hi5 IM.

It appears that the social network is looking to amp its “entertainment features” to gain more users and is also focusing on engaging users though casual gaming and micro-payments. Hi5 also recently partnered with Paymo to power mobile payments for virtual goods. The social network is hoping that real-time chat will compliment casual games, and interaction with other content on the social network.

hi5 IM also enables users to share and express their emotions through animated hi5 “star” emoticons. The star, derived from the hi5 logo, represents a variety of virtual gestures and emotions, such as sad, happy, laughing, crying, playing dead, angry and shy. Last month, the self-described “world’s leading social entertainment web site,” got a new CEO, Bill Gossman, formerly the CEO of the online advertising service Audience Science. And at the end of March, the social network hi5 cut a large percentage of its staff following the failure of a new round of funding to materialize.

With nearly 60 million active users, hi5 has a good sized audience, but it’s long been far behind the big boys in the social networking space, MySpace and Facebook. Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide with 294.7 million unique visitors, with MySpace coming in second with 125.7 million unique visitors. hi5 gets about 63 million monthly unique visits worldwide but only 3.7 million of those are from the U.S., according to ComScore’s March stats. And a good chunk of ts audience is in countries where it is hard to attract advertisers,

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If you think you can beat the stock market, don’t bother reading this post. This post is about a startup that wants to make investing boring and predictable, which is something most of the investing public could use right now. MarketRiders has actually been in beta for about a year, and now it is ready to be tested by a broader group of investors. The idea is simple: If you get your asset allocation right and eliminate management fees, you can boost your returns and outperform nearly every actively traded fund over the long haul.

Mitch Tuchman, the founder of MarketRiders and a former hedge fund manager, studied the investment strategies of big university endowments like Yale’s. He learned that 80 to 90 percent of returns within any given year come from being in the right asset class (stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, emerging markets), not from stock picking or market timing. The trick to steady returns is to try to mimic the market, not beat it, through exposure to broad asset classes. “Wall Street is the biggest fleecing machine in the world,” says Tuchman. “It is selling investors on the idea that if you give this manager money he will give you a better return than the market.”

A better strategy, he thinks, is simply to buy a variety of exchange-traded funds which index different markets and then periodically re-balance your portfolio. Rebalancing means trimming back the (inflated) winners and buying the (cheap) losers, which requires discipline and emotional detachment. MarketRiders helps you come up with an asset allocation strategy appropriate to your age and investment goals, suggests ETFs to buy, and then sends you rebalancing alerts whenever necessary. ETFs have very low fees, which help overall returns.

You still need to take the suggestions and place orders with your broker—a detail which introduces some friction into the process. But once you have your account set up, it tracks everything automatically. Still, for the $9.95/month MarketRiders is asking, it could at least hook up with your brokerage account and do the re-balancing automatically.

Nevertheless, Tuchman is on a mission: “I am trying to save people from the biggest con game in the country right now.” If you feel comfortable taking an active role in managing your own money and can attend to it on a regular basis, you can give MarketRiders a free try for a month. You can click on the image below to see a screenshot showing a typical portfolio, along with the alert levels (red means sell, green means buy).

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San Francisco-based hi5 , which operates the third largest social networking service in the world, is announcing a partnership with PlaySpan today in an effort to get more revenue out of its 60+ million members.

Original post:
In Quest For Real Revenue From Virtual Goods, hi5 Teams Up With PlaySpan

If you’ve been using the recently released Google Earth 5.0 to check out what the oceans look like from beneath the water surface (tip: use the flight simulator to fly underwater), you’ll be happy to know that the company has extended that capability to the “Third Coast” of the U.S., meaning the five Great Lakes of North America (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario) that form the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet (roughly 22% of it according to Wikipedia ). Through a cooperative effort with the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) and the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Google Earth now incorporates detailed bathymetry for the five Great Lakes. Users will be able to explore features such as the canyons and shoals in eastern Lake Superior, the Lake Michigan mid-lake reef complex, and the old river channel, now underwater, that once connected Lakes Michigan and Huron at the Straits of Mackinac.

Original post: 
Dive Into The Five Great Lakes With Google Earth