Social site + virtual world = Hi5

It's the first marriage I've seen of social networking and virtual worlds: that of Auckland-based Small Worlds and San Francisco-based Hi5.com, by most measures one of the world's Top 20 social-network sites. A bit about SmallWorlds.com (which is not a kids' virtual world) from Venture Beat: Like Hi5, it's aimed at people 13 and up. It has signed up 650,000 users since launch last December, about 65% of them female and half aged 13-18 (30% 19-35). One of its attractions is that, in building out your "small world," you can "easily import anything [you've] created on the Web." Small Worlds also has "built-in incentives to keep users coming back. The more you participate, the more access you get to virtual items." Hi5 had already launched its games channel earlier this year, so this seems a very logical next step. It also already had a virtual economy in place (users could pay for virtual gifts with real-money-based Hi5 "Coins"), so now users will have spaces in which to place virtual furniture, art, plants, etc., along the lines of the very international Habbo, which could be considered a precursor to the Hi5/SmallWorlds arrangement. What's new is mature social network and fairly well-established VW making a go of it together.

Hi5 socializing for mobiles

The difference between Hi5.com's social-network site for the cellphone screen and those of MySpace and Facebook, CNET points out, is that Hi5's mobile edition 1) "openly targets" people around the world who primarily use mobile phones, not computers, to socialize, and 2) launched in 26 languages. CNET says Facebook and MySpace's mobile editions are designed more as supplements to their Web browser-accessed sites. Point No. 1 above makes particular sense for Hi5's Latin American market, if comScore's international social-networking data is to be believed. ComScore's recently unveiled data showed a 1,055% increase in traffic for Hi5 between June 2007 and this past June. Here's my summary of the comScore report. Here, too, is some context on the growing MoSoSo, or mobile-social-networking, phenomenon from the Christian Science Monitor.

Latin America's social Web

Hi5.com is No. 1 in Latin America's social-networking scene, according to fresh figures from comScore, and social Web use as a whole is growing fast there. The number of unique visitors for the region has grown "from 53.6 million unique visitors last June, to 61.6 million this past April" (the latest figure available), VentureBeat.com cites comScore research as showing. Hi5 had 12.8 million visitors in April, "about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world." Facebook (whose worldwide user figure for April was 116.4 million compared to MySpace's 115.7 million) was the fastest-growing SNS in the region and had 7.7 million Latin American visitors in April. One possible explanation for Hi5's popularity might be its linguistic tailoring for individual markets - e.g., "two new Spanish versions, for the Argentinian and Castilian dialects, with more dialect translations to come." It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against [Google's] Orkut." Other growth sites to watch are Sonico, Batanga, and Vostu (for people to create their own social sites), VentureBeat reports. Having said all that, VentureBeat adds that blogging is still more popular than social networking in Latin America, with blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger, and local platforms "larger than Hi5 or any of its competitors," and mobile social networking is exploding (66% of Latin Americans own mobile phones, compared to the worldwide average of 46%).