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Hi5, one of the larger social networks in the world after Facebook and MySpace, is launching a mobile version of its site in 26 languages. Point your mobile browser to m.hi5.com to check it out, or take a look at the screenshot.

The mobile version, as you can see from the screenshot, offers some but not all of the features found on the web site. The mobile features include the ability to send and receive messages in real time, see status updates, browse friends profiles, comment on items and see friend requests and add friends. It also shows you who else is online and using the mobile app at the moment, useful in case you want to call them.

Moving into mobile is important for Hi5 because 80 percent of its users are outside of the US, in non-English speaking countries like Peru, Portugal, Romania and Thailand. These regions, especially Spanish-speaking Latin America, where hi5 is largest, are seeing increasing mobile data usage. This move also helps head off competition. Hi5 has been one of the fastest-growing social networks in the world this year, according to comScore, growing from 31.4 million monthly active users last December to 56 million users in June. Facebook, notably, has also gotten some serious traction in Latin America after it released its Spanish version this spring.

San Francisco-based Hi5 itself made a point of translating its web version into Spanish years ago, a move it says helps explain why it — and not rivals — grew more quickly in certain countries. Today, it believes it now offers the most mobile translations of any large social network (although I haven’t verified that).

The company doesn’t disclose how many people use the mobile browser to access the Web site, but it says the number is high.

The company also used a combination of user input and professional translation to create the mobile versions, similar to what Facebook did with its web versions. In the future, it plans to simultaneously introduce web and mobile versions of additional languages it decides to offer.

Hi5 also points out that it’s less “Silicon Valley-centric” than some rivals. Facebook, for example, keeps coming out with new versions of its iPhone app (which I, being admittedly Silicon Valley-centric, like). Most of hi5’s users have phones made by Nokia, LG, Samsung and Motorola, phones that have long been popular around the world, in markets the iPhone has yet to penetrate.

In sum, this is a timely bid for hi5 to build out its mobile presence, especially to solidify its popularity with its web users.

Hi5 has had a growth spurt over the first half of this year, growing from 31 million to 56 million monthly active users over the first six months of the year. Like its still-larger rivals Facebook and MySpace, it has been hiring lots of senior leaders, especially on on the business side.

Before the list of hires, a little background: San Francisco, Calif.-based hi5’s largest group of users is in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, where it competes against local sites and Facebook. Hi5 says its growth can be attributed to its long-time focus on markets outside of the U.S. It has offered customized versions of the site in Spanish and other languages for years, currently available in 27 total.

It claims to be the largest social network in 25 countries around the world. To help visualize the company’s reach, I’ve included a world map view of Google search results for hi5, by country — a correlated measure of popularity.

The hires:

Jeff Stephens: Chief financial officer, in charge of finance, human resources and administrative functions. Previously senior vice president of finance and administration as well as corporate controller at QuinStreet, Inc. and corporate controller at Sonnet Financial.

David Kim: Vice president, business development and strategy, manages partnerships, revenue initiatives and strategic planning on the business side. In his most recent position, he was a senior vice president at Harcourt Education, a division of Reed Elsevier, where he led strategy and business & corporate development and oversaw its eventual sale

Noelia Amoedo: vice president, mobile, in charge of mobile business strategy and partnerships. Previously at Buongiorno, a mobile services company, where she was the managing director of the company’s U.S. division.

Ram Gudavalli: Vice president, engineering. He has been promoted up since joining in 2004. Previously an engineer at Mixonic.

Michael Trigg : Vice president, marketing. Previously co-founder of Truviso, a real-time data analytics company, and vice president of Marketing at Spoke, a professional social networking site.

Adriana Gascoigne: Director of communications. Previously vice president of Ogilvey PR’s 360 Digital Influence division; before that, she was at Brian Solis’ FutureWorks Media.

Karen Richardson, a partner at private equity firm (but not hi5 investor) Silver Lake Partners, has also joined the company.

Facebook and MySpace get most of the press, but another social network out there is growing much faster than either: hi5. The social network is the world’s fastest growing among the top-10 networks in that category, according to June data from analytics firm comScore.

Hi5 grew 79 percent in the first half of 2008 — twice as fast as any of the other top social networks. The site’s unique visitors grew from 31.4 million in December 2007 to 56.4 million in June 2008. Interestingly, hi5, which is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., says that over 80 percent of its users are outside of the U.S.

Of course, it’s easier to grow faster when you’re not as large as MySpace or Facebook. Facebook has still had very impressive growth recently as well, while MySpace seems to be lagging a bit.

Facebook’s annual f8 conference is currently going on in San Francisco. Our own Eric Eldon is live-blogging it.

Here’s the latest action:

More than 22,000 Canadians revolt against monopolistic iPhone rates — Rogers, the telecommunications company that holds a near-monopoly in the Canadian mobile market, is facing a revolt from users who were looking forward to getting 3G iPhones. Its terms include a mandatory 3-year contract, as well as limited calling time, text messages, and a limit on the new phone’s data transfer, with accompanying fees if you go over on anything. In other words, Rogers wants to scalp anyone who tries to use the iPhone for its intended uses, like browsing the web — undermining Apple’s own ads showing freewheeling mobile web browsing on the phone. A number of sites have popped up to protest. The largest one, ruinediphone.com, has gained more than 22,000 petition signatures so far. See Techmeme and Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog for more.

Openwave sells mobile software business — Redwood City, Calif.-based Openwave, a publicly-traded company that builds software for communications companies, has sold its mobile unit to France-based Purple Labs for $32 million plus earn-out options worth $2 million.

Yahoo launches mobile version designed for the Olympic games — Now, m.yahoo.com/2008games (pictured) shows you news, photos, Beijing weather and other information related to China’s Olympic games starting later this summer.

Record label EMI goes after social network hi5 and others because its users uploaded some pirated old songs — These songs aren’t modern hits, they’re the songs you don’t admit you used to listen to, like anything by Paula Abdul. They’re also EMI property, and hi5 users were uploading them without EMI’s permission. CNET has more.

Seedcamp, a European event for startups, is now accepting applications — You can apply here.

Ausra opens Las Vegas manufacturing plant — Solar thermal startup Ausra has opened its manufacturing plant near Las Vegas, Nevada. As we reported in December, the plant will churn out about 700 megawatts worth of solar thermal components yearly once it hits full production, which is expected to happen in 2010.

Early BitTorrent administrator facing 10 years of jail time — 26-year old Daniel Dove was a long-time lead administrator at an illegal file-sharing site that used BitTorrent technology to do things like share pirated copies of the Star Wars movies before they came out. Movie and music industry lawyers have put together evidence of his actions that the federal government is using to prosecute him. Now he’s facing sentencing.

Large tech companies band together to fight other potential patent holders — The Wall Street Journal has the details.

The Bureau of Land Management freezes new solar plant development for two years while it does environmental impact reports — Some startups call this announcement a “setback”, some are saying it’s a boon because the application process will be overhauled in the meantime. The decision won’t be crippling to most of the startups we write about; panels makers will be okay for the moment, while big solar thermal guys like Ausra and Brightsource already have their hands full with planned projects.

Rhapsody makes the move to DRM-free music — It thinks it will be able to compete with Apple’s iTunes Music Store in doing so, according to The New York Times. Hey, dream big. Right?

Mac OS X 10.5.4 is released — Patches and bug fixes galore. Details from Apple.

[Solar photo via NYT, via Reuters, via the Las Vegas Sun.]

Social network hi5 has bought a social network application developer company called PixVerse for an undisclosed amount. While PixVerse’s applications, like Pix Chat and Pix Wall, run on multiple platforms on rival social networks, the reason for the purchase is that hi5 wants its technology.

PixVerse applications are based on what it considers a “breakthrough” implementation of Adobe’s Flash technology that it has built its various applications on. It also uses Google App Engine, which lets third parties use Google’s infrastructure for their own sites.

Hi5 will use PixVerse to build out its own chat features for its users, although details are still vague. From the company:

To answer your question, the PixVerse team and technology give us some great resources for enhancing real-time communication (IM, chat, etc.) between users of hi5. We won’t be announcing specific product plans till later this year, but we see this as a great add-on to our core service.

PixVerse raised previously unannounced funding from venture firm Venrock.

San Francisco-based hi5 is one of the larger social networks in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors per month. It claims to be the number one social network in various Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, parts of Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

“At first we were worried about MySpace, but then we realized that people use it differently from our site,” an employee at social network Facebook told me over a year ago. What he meant is that Facebook is a place for people to put their real lives online, providing factual information about themselves and having trusted interactions with their friends. Meanwhile, rival MySpace is more of a place for people to live out their fantasy lives online, borrowing celebrity photos for their profile pictures, adding far-fetched biographical information and such — MySpace uses the term “self-expression” to describe this behavior.

These cultural differences are, of course, not true across the board but are generally obvious to anyone who uses both social networks. And they’re a huge deal, even though most coverage I’ve seen doesn’t acknowledge it.

Facebook’s global user numbers have boomed from around 40 million monthly unique visitors in April, 2007 to 115 million unique monthly users this past April, with 62 million new users coming from outside the US.

Compare that to MySpace, which counts 73 million of its global users in the US and is now globally a close second to Facebook, having hardly grown anywhere over the past year. In fact, another traffic measurement firm, Nielsen Online, says that MySpace had 4.7 million U.S. visitors in April, down 30 percent from last year. [Note: This is a bizarrely low number, although the BBC and WebProNews are citing it -- I'm looking for confirmation from Nielsen. I'm sticking with comScore numbers for now.]

Taking a deeper dive into Facebook’s growth in regions around the world, it’s important to note that in many places MySpace has never been dominant. For example, another social network, hi5 — which has an interface more similar to MySpace’s, has been the market leader in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries for years. And while hi5 is still growing fast, Facebook has been busy catching up to it in a matter of months, especially after Facebook released a Spanish-language version of its site in March.

How Facebook is keeping it real

Facebook’s growth is global in more ways than one. While it continues to have a relatively white collar, college-based user population in the U.S., it has seen uptake across all demographics in other countries. For example, when the site took off in Canada in the winter of 2007, two-thirds of the entire city of Toronto quickly joined, not just the rich kids. Facebook employees tell me they’ve seen the same pattern in every country outside of the U.S.

Facebook started as a college campus hit in the U.S., with students using the service to share information like which dorm they lived in, what movies they liked, and who they hooked up with. If they provided fake information, their friends from across the hall would simply leave comments saying so on their profile pages. Facebook built this real-world community aspect into its site through local and regional networks that you join when you sign up — an idea it has gradually expanded on as it opens up to more and more people in the U.S. and around the world.

Now, put yourself in the mind of the average user in another country. You’re joining because you want to hang out with friends around you, or maybe friends who have immigrated to other countries, or maybe you want to meet new people in other countries because you’re human and you’re curious about people in general.

Let’s say a friend who lives near you invites you to join. You see your friend’s real information, you mimic that by providing your own. You start using the site and you see that basically most other users have also added their real information, confirming that you should continue to provide real information on the site. Facebook also asks you to join a local network — which most new users seem to do — and you immediately get access to a bunch of other people a lot like you.

Now, let’s say you start looking around the site. You go to the profile page of a worldwide icon like English soccer club Manchester United, and see real users from around the world leaving comments. Or say you’re using a flirting application and start flirting with real people, also from around the world. In either case, you friend these people because you find you have something in common with them, and would like to see their full profiles (on Facebook, you normally have to either friend people or be in their network to see their full profiles). They friend you back, and pretty soon you, the new user, has a large Facebook friend list that gives you a direct view into who people really are, everywhere.

Facebook users in many Middle Eastern countries and Facebook users in the US have been busy making friends and overcoming larger political and religious differences, as Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has noted — and as I have personally seen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Latin America is a growing online market, with monthly unique visitors in the region growing from 53.6 million unique visitors last June, according to comScore’s first report covering the entire region, to 61.6 million this past April.

More internet users means more opportunity for social networks. For example, a new social network, Sonico, claims to have gained 17 million registered users since it launched last July, and has just raised a $4.3 million round from DN Capital and angel investors.

But Hi5 is the largest social network in the Spanish-speaking countries (except for Google’s Orkut, which dominates Brazil). San Francisco-based hi5 gained its position by doing things like introducing a Spanish version of its site a couple of years go, while market leaders Facebook and MySpace focused on US growth. This past April, hi5 had 12.8 million unique visitors, about a quarter of its 45 million monthly visitors around the world. That’s a 20 percent increase from two months ago, when the site had 10.7 million unique visitors in Latin America, according to Comscore. This is part of hi5’s worldwide growth trend: Hi5 has grown from 31.5 million last December, according to comScore.

ComScore data doesn’t count internet cafes nor does it count mobile traffic. Hi5’s internal numbers, with those two traffic sources included, show 16 million users a month in Latin America, with more than 30 million total registered users in the region through May.

But Facebook has shown the most shocking growth around the world over the past half year, coming in with 116.4 million worldwide users in April, over MySpace’s 115.7 million. Facebook is also booming in Latin America. Earlier this month, I wrote that the company had gone from four to six million Latin American users in March, likely spurred by the introduction of its Spanish-language version then. ComScore’s latest numbers from Latin America now show that Facebook had 7.7 million unique visitors in April.

So, Facebook appears to be growing faster than hi5 — although Sonico claims to be the fastest-growing Latin American social network.

Meanwhile, Fox Media Interactive has dropped from 14 million unique users last July to 11.7 million in April. It’s worth noting that Intel funded Vostu, which has raised a seed round of $1.3 million for a social networking platform that allows consumers to build their own social networks.

So what’s driving some networks’ growth, besides shear numbers of new Latin American users? Maybe, for Facebook, the fact that it is largely comprised of real people providing factual information about themselves — not fake profiles like what you see on other social networks — makes the difference? It’s not clear what’s happening driving Sonico’s growth, and anyway, it doesn’t register as a top site with comscore. Hi5, meanwhile, has continued with its market-specific customizations. It has recently introduced two new Spanish versions, for the Argentinian and Castilian dialects, with more dialect translations to come — using user-generated translations like what Facebook has already done. It also launched a Brazilian Portuguese version in March to compete against Orkut. It has also introduced a Spanish-language help page. Maybe this will allow it to keep growing, and maintain its market leadership?

There are also local competitors that provide social networking services — like Batanga, which had 8.8 million users in April. Blog platforms like Wordpress, Blogger and local services are also larger than hi5 or any of its competitors.

Mobile social networking usage is exploding around the world, even more than web usage, as hi5’s internal data already suggests. Already, 375 million Latin Americans own a mobile phone — 66 percent of the total population, versus the 46 percent worldwide average. The mobile versions of large web-based social networks seem to have a big advantage when it comes to getting big on mobile, because web users go to the mobile versions of their web social network. This means sites like hi5 and Facebook have a lot of leverage in taking over the market.

Update: Per the comments below, I’ve added another table from this past April’s comScore report on Latin America.

Facebook’s growth has apparently slowed down in the US and the UK, the first countries where it grew big.

But it’s still growing around the world, passing 70 million worldwide monthly active users, according to the company’s official count.

In particular, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is newly popular in Latin America, where it has grown to six million now from four million monthly active users in late March, the company tells me. This may have something to do with Facebook’s translation application, where users have translated the text on the site into eight languages so far, starting with Spanish this past March (see screenshot, below).

Facebook is especially popular in Colombia, where it has two million users alone, and Chile. In Colombia, for example, Facebook has been used to organize protests against terrorist acts committed by FARC, the country’s left-wing guerilla army.

Aside: This is interesting, because right-wing paramilitary groups have also committed many terrorist acts, and aren’t being protested to the same degree on Facebook.

Facebook also counts Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela among the thirty countries with the most Facebook users. My hunch is that Facebook’s American-college image goes down particularly well with pro-American Colombians and iconoclastic Chileans. The latter country, notably, has not adopted rival social network hi5, currently the largest social network in Spanish-speaking countries, to the degree that many of its neighbors have.

Aside from Google’s Orkut, which is big in Brazil, hi5 is the largest social network in the region. It has not been sitting idle as Facebook expands. Most notably, it has been working on a new but well-received effort to build its own developer platform, like rival Facebook’s.

How valuable is this hi5 platform? Will new applications for things like social games create more reasons for Latin American users to stay on hi5 versus move to Facebook? The stats look pretty good for hi5 so far. A little over half of its users have installed applications, even though the platform has only been fully available since the end of March. In total, applications are installed a million times per day and generate 6.5 million page views on application pages per day.

MySpace has already maintained its user base in the US, even as Facebook grew after it. Hi5 may turn out to be the MySpace of Spanish-speaking Latin America; some people will prefer Facebook, some won’t.

[Satellite image via Geography.com]

With more than 35 million monthly active users around the world, Hi5 is one of the largest social networks behind social network leaders MySpace and Facebook. It never seems to get much attention in the tech press, for whatever reason, but that may change if the San Francisco company’s developer platform continues growing like it has been since it launched three weeks ago.

Last week I wrote that applications built by leading widget company RockYou were showing an early dominant performance on the site, but the larger story here is that the whole platform seems to be doing well. More than one million applications are being installed by users each day, with about half of the site’s active users engaging with installed apps on a daily basis; more than 300 apps are now live on the site; and more than 9,000 developers are building applications for Hi5.

Does Hi5 have a market-leading platform?

Platforms offered by MySpace, Orkut and other social networks have failed to yield growth and engagement for apps in the same way. Hi5 offers a more compelling platform, at least for now, for the following reasons. It has a large, international audience, a number of missing features that its letting outside developers fill in (like events calendars), and viral channels for growth.

Most of Hi5’s users are in non-English speaking countries, and around 75 percent don’t use any other social network, according to the company. So far, the most popular applications on the site tend to have elements of cultural expression. One popular application lets users display an image of their favorite soccer star on their profile page, Hi5 chief executive Ramu Yalamanchi tells me — this is a good fit with the site’s large Latin American, soccer-loving audience. Other popular applications let users include their country’s flag or other information on their profile page.

Hi5 itself has only offered fairly basic features to its users up until now. One of the most strikingly popular new apps on this front is called TheVerb, a basic events planning calendar developed by a student at Arizona State University. It’s had around 800,000 installs, maybe because it includes Spanish translations, maybe because it lets people invite each other to do certain activities by clicking on icons (like a soccer ball, to send to a friend you want to play soccer with) — and probably because Hi5 didn’t previously offer an events planning feature.

Read the rest of this entry »

Updated with commentary from RockYou

It’s a tale of two social network developer platforms. Hi5, a site popular in some Spanish-speaking Latin American countries and other regions around the world, launched its platform at the beginning of this month — and the third parties that have applications on the site are reporting impressive growth.

Leading widget company RockYou, for example, says its “SuperFive” application has already been installed two million times in the last couple of weeks. Why? Hi5 specifically offers ways for users to contact each other through third-party applications.

Meanwhile, applications on market leader MySpace’s platform have been seeing insignificant growth since it launched in mid-March — because MySpace has yet to introduce effective ways for applications to contact users. However, one top developer tells us that MySpace will soon be offering notifications, email messages, and other so-called “viral channels” already available on Hi5.

So MySpace may soon become the hot spot for applications that third parties have long hoped for. Meanwhile, Hi5 may have done a better job of addressing the spam problem.

Does “viral growth” = spam?

To get an idea of what I mean by “viral growth,” here’s a closer look at RockYou’s “SuperFive” application, which lets users send action messages like a “hug,” “tickle,” etc. to Hi5 friends. If this sounds familiar, it’s because 1) Hi5 already has a feature called “five” which is basically a copy of Facebook’s “poke” feature and 2) RockYou and competitors already offer Facebook applications where you can hug/tickle/poke your Facebook friends

I’ve been hearing that this messaging feature is actually useful for companies that want branded contact with users, like being able to “throw a Coke” at a friend (I made that example up, but you get my drift). Many developers have made good money from selling branded pokes/hugs/tickles.

Update: While this sort of application may seem silly to me, and to many VentureBeat readers, RockYou points out that many, many users find it meaningful — and who are we to judge that? RockYou also makes another interesting point.

Facebook, the first social network to offer a developer platform, has spent much of the past year shutting down ways that applications spam users — and trying to placate users who don’t want to use applications.

Hi5 has instead come out with a new notification system specifically for applications (see the bottom of the screenshot). This means that there is little risk of users feeling spammed by applications messages, because they can just ignore invites, etc. if they don’t want to deal with it.

RockYou says it has been working hard with Hi5 and other social networks to make sure that its user experience is non-intrusive.

The bigger picture

Another other story here is that Hi5 — and MySpace — allow applications built in the OpenSocial application standard to run on their platforms. OpenSocial lets a developer quickly modify an application so it can work on any site that conforms to OpenSocial’s specifications. RockYou and many other developers say that Open Social is saving them time writing code, even though each member social network requires some customization to fit its particular feature set.

It looks like Hi5 is going to stay at the center of developer attention, at least for awhile. As the San Francisco company bragged when it launched its platform, there’s only a 25 percent overlap between its 35 million monthly active worldwide users, and users on rival social networks: The average Hi5 user isn’t on MySpace or Facebook. This means that it is especially important for developers to build applications in languages besides English, top application developer Blake Commagere tells me. Hi5 even offered free language translation services to the first 100 apps submitted.

While still in its early days, Hi5 may have found a good balance between growth and spam-control.

Here the latest action:

Social network Hi5 publicly launches its developer platform — San Francisco-based Hi5 may be a big opportunity for developers of third-party applications that live on social networks. It is popular in places like Portugal, Thailand and select countries of Latin America. Overall, it’s one of the largest social networks worldwide, with more than 35 million monthly active users — and the company claims that only 25 percent of them also have profiles on other social networks.

Many developers have been excited about MySpace’s developer launch a couple weeks ago, but the company has yet to release a way for users to easily send messages to each other — friend invites and updates from an application — and application growth has yet to happen. One big difference with Hi5, as Mashable points out, is that it specifically lets applications tap into communication channels on the site. These so-called “viral loops” can lead to exploding traffic for applications, as seen on Facebook’s formative platform launched last May. But abusive applications spam users with too many messages — also a problem that Facebook has been dealing with. It remains to be seen how Hi5 will both help applications grow and keep users happy. See our previous coverage of Hi5’s platform here and here.

Facebook does regular old targeted advertising — The social network is working with job site CareerBuilder.com on a non-exclusive ad campaign, where Facebook will run its ads on the side of pages and in news feeds. The specialized recruiting ads will be targeted based on information on a user’s profile, like what their major is in college, according to Reuters. Many had expected to see more such ad targeting done by Facebook itself last year, but it instead introduced Beacon, which automatically tells your friends about the purchases you make on other sites — and proved unpopular with users.

Silicon Valley start-ups are losing their sizzle — The slumping stock market has stalled potential IPOs (initial public offerings) and may slow the creation of new start-ups for the next year or two, the San Jose Mercury News reports. There have been only four IPOs nationwide so far this year and the Nasdaq being down almost 15 percent isn’t likely to create a rush of new ones.

Social news site Buzznet may have acquired music application maker Qloud – The deal went down for a little over Qloud’s last valuation, a source tells Mashable. Backed by former AOL head Steve Case, Qloud has had over 1.8 million Facebook users install its “My Music” application. Meanwhile, Buzznet is rumored to be raising a new round of $25 million, according to PaidContent.

For the first time in 38 years, a new type of memory chip is about to hit the market — A joint venture between Intel and STMicroelectronics called Numonyx has created a new type of memory chip known as phase charge memory (PCM), CNET reports. The chips uses a laser to hit a material, which can melt into two different kinds of crystals. Those crystals serve as the ones and zeroes of digital memory. Interestingly enough, Gordon Moore (the co-founder of Intel and of Moore’s Law fame), predicted such a type of memory in an issue of Electronics magazine in 1970.

Personal shopping recommendation site StyleFeeder has opened its API — Developers will now be able to create third-party applications and widgets centered around StyleFeeder to put on any e-commerce site. Personalized search, bookmarking, item recommendations, watchlists, and customizable images will all be accessible through this API. The Watertown, Massachusetts-based StyleFeeder recently received a $2 million Series A round from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Capital.

After months of delay, Livescribe finally releases its computer-in-a-pen device — We’ve seen several demos of the cool technology, which allows students to take lecture notes on a special paper. When tracing over those notes later, students can call up an audio recording of the words being spoken as those lines were written. The pen can also be used to do math calculations, translate words, and record conversations. Limited quantities of the pen have begun shipping, according to the company blog (currently down). We previously covered the company last year.

OpenSocial, the Google-led platform to allow applications to be built across social networks, has been criticized as slow moving.

However, progress is being made. Today, social music services iLike and QLoud introduced the first OpenSocial applications for the popular social network Hi5.

ILike’s Hi5 application lets you post songs and videos to your Hi5 profile. This is similar to iLike’s popular Facebook application.

ILike’s strategy is to build social music applications across social networks — Facebook, Hi5, and the rest — then let musicians communicate with their fans across all of these networks (our coverage). OpenSocial is designed to allow applications to work on multiple social networks without extra development effort. To iLike, Hi5 is an untapped market and OpenSocial is the tap.

The Seattle, Wash.-based iLike has also recently introduced applications designed for musicians on Facebook, to let them upload their discographies and communicate with their fans. Note: Facebook, as we’ve written, has itself been working on what appear to be competing music applications.

Hi5 had previously promised to host third-party applications within the next year, so this is quick work, as Nick O’Neill points out.

Still, iLike is the largest company experimenting with music and these social networking applications. It has nearly half a million daily active users on Facebook.

Qloud, meanwhile, is one of the others. Its Hi5 application lets you listen to and share your iTunes libraries from within Hi5, or Facebook or Friendster. It is a smaller and less polished application than iLike. The biggest problem with the application is its iTunes sidebar, where you add music from iTunes that will appear within these networks. This sidebar is slow and has made iTunes less responsive on this reporter’s computer.

These applications are the first snowflakes of a blizzard. There will no doubt be many announcements about OpenSocial applications. Thousands of Facebook applications launched since May will be trying to find a home on OpenSocial. We won’t cover many of them, because most will have poor design or undifferentiated features. In aggregate, however, these applications are the start of something bigger — potentially.

If you believe the executives at iLike and other application developers, these social networks are the future of digital media, the main places where people communicate, share music, play games and maybe even get some work done in the coming years.

Facebook rival Hi5 says it is working on its own developer platform today, the latest social network to realize that it had better open up quickly or potentially lose customers to more active pastures.

The San Francisco company announced the move at the CommunityNext conference, for developers who build applications on social networking platforms.

Back in May, Facebook launched a platform for letting software developers build applications within its site. The move has kicked off a wave of excitement. It has created serious concern at MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo and other social networks.

There are at least four conferences in the Bay Area alone this month on the topic of platforms.

Hi5 is around the same size as Facebook worldwide, with more than 35 million active users on its site, according to recent Comscore data.

While Facebook is growing quickly around the world, the majority of Hi5’s users are already located outside of the US. Hi5 is known for reconnecting immigrants in a new country with long-lost friends and family members back in their home country. Such differences between user bases have an impact on what sort of applications are developed for the respective platforms. Its easy to imagine a Hi5 application, for example, that lets users find other people from their hometowns who now live in their new community.

Hi5’s executives told me today that they are getting feedback from its users and third party developers about how to prepare the platform.

The company already lets users embed Flash widgets developed by third parties, similar to Myspace. It has also developed more advanced features of its application programming interface (API). It is currently giving access to select widget-makers, including Slide and RockYou.

Hi5 hopes to have a platform ready for general use within the next twelve months.

Slide and RockYou, rivals for the crown of Widget King, both recently told VentureBeat they expect to capture the third-party application market on Hi5, Bebo and other social networks when these networks launch their own developer platforms.

They cite their experience building Flash widgets on Myspace and other social networks, and building applications on Facebook, as impetus for their success on new platforms.

However, some smaller companies are also doing quite well. Several one- and two-man teams of developers of Facebook apps say they’re making more than enough money on Facebook to support themselves. They’re doing so in part by using the existing Facebook ad networks. Some are looking for angel or VC investment to grow more quickly, but say they can survive without it.

Other upcoming Facebook conferences in the Bay (that we know about) include:

- Graphing Social Patterns

- App-Camp

- SNAP

[Update 7/25: Tagged's Greg Tseng has gotten back to us and said there has been no funding and that the TechCrunch article "was entirely false."]

Tagged is rumored to have followed Hi5 in raising a large amounts of cash to try to conquer the social network global market.

Tagged, of San Francisco, has raised $15 million, on a reported $102 million pre-money valuation, according to Techcrunch, meaning investors value it at $117 million. Investors weren’t disclosed.

The race is on. Moreover, the timing of the latest investments is likely no coincidence.

Google saw 47 percent of its ad revenue from international markets during the first quarter. Investors are betting social networks are going to see strong growth abroad. Hi5, in particular, is already quite active internationally. Moreover, some investors looked at both companies, we’re hearing. When one group decided to back Hi5, the other may have signed with Tagged, though that’s just speculation on our part.

Hi5 and Tagged are the third and fifth largest social networking companies respectively. They have both lost U.S. market share dramatically over the past year, according to Hitwise (see table at left, and method description below; the data is open to lots of questions).

Here are the top seven networks, according to Comscore data on unique users globally for May. We’re trying to get June figures, and will update.

1. MySpace
2. Facebook
3. Hi5
4. Friendster
5. Tagged
6. Bebo
7. Piczo

Update: We’ve just gotten June figures from Comscore. We’ve inserted the chart below, which includes a range of sites not associated with full-fledged social networks, but categorized as such by Comscore’s broad definition. You’ll note that Tagged, for some reason, has fallen off the list.

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Hi5 and Tagged had raised the least amount of money among the top seven networks, especially Hi5, which had raised to less than $1 million previously. This makes their accomplishments all the more impressive. Both companies are profitable, based on advertising. Last night, we reported that Hi5 had raised $20 million more. Tagged had previously raised $8.5 million from Mayfield and angel investors.

Myspace is now part of a public company. Facebook and Friendster (see our recent coverage of that company’s fast growth lately) have each raised much more money in the past. Piczo raised $11 million earlier this year. Last year, Bebo raised $15 million from Benchmark Capital

We just talked with David Feinleib, of Mohr Davidow Ventures, who led the venture firm’s investment into San Francisco’s Hi5. He wouldn’t comment on the coincidence of the timing, but did say his firm had looked at Tagged too. He said there are very few companies that have been able to round up tens of million of users, and that his interest in Hi5 came from its international exposure and scrappy ability to grow despite very little backing. Feinleib says the company has a chance to get to 100 million users worldwide. It has a team of almost 40 employees.

Some have remarked that both companies, in particular Tagged, have used aggressive marketing tactics to sign up customers, making it very difficult not to spam friends with invites during the registration process, for example. It convinces new users to reveal their contact lists, and then sends invites to each of the contacts. VentureBeat has been trying to talk with Tagged about this policy for sometime. Tagged’s chief executive, Greg Tseng, told us in early June he was “in the middle of a huge deal.” and would talk when he came up for air.

We’ve put in a request for comment and will keep you posted when we know more.

Note on Hitwise data - This is what Hitwise tells us about the data. It “is based on a custom category of 21 of the leading social networking websites ranked by US market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. Hitwise ranks more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context.”

Hi5, a social network with 30 million active users around the world — the same size as Facebook — has reportedly raised a $20 million round. GigaOm has more, saying Mohr Davidow Ventures is the backer.

Last week, England-based social network Bebo made it clear they, like Facebook, intend to further open their site to third-party developers.

These are the latest reminders that even though the media hype has mostly transferred from MySpace to Facebook, the rest of the world is happily using a variety of social networks.

Bebo chief executive Michael Birch conceded Facebook’s platform will likely be a success as applications — which have poured onto the platform to serve Facebook users — improve over time. In the meantime, he said, “[t]here’s definitely teething issues. There’s application overload and they’re slightly Mickey Mouse at the moment.”

Hi5 has translated its site into a number of languages since it started, which has given it a big international head start over the other social networks, company chief executive Ramu Yalamanchi told us last week. As GigaOm’s post notes, it originally began as a “social-network-plus matrimonial site targeting the Indian diaspora.” The international characteristics of Hi5 contrast with Facebook’s roots in student life on American college campuses. For example, Facebook has yet to translate itself to anything besides English. Meanwhile, Myspace has been slowly opening up sites for specific countries.

Here’s numbers Comscore provided us, showing the top social networks through May: