Hi5 Platform launching next week with a full slate of viral channels
Hi5 announced earlier this week that with next week’s launch of the Hi5 Platform with OpenSocial 0.7 support, developers can expect to use a full suite of viral channels starting March 31:
- Invitations
- Notifications
- Emails
- Friend Updates (like Mini Feed and News Feed)
While the devil is always in the implementation details, this is a promising sign for developers considering building for Hi5. Of course, Hi5 will need to implement good spam control to keep quality high.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Good spam control is difficult as Facebook has proven. To keep quality high they should just ditch invitations altogether. All invitations do is encourage applications whose primary function is to replicate themselves as many times as possible on people profiles so that lousy developers can try and score an easy couple of bucks on adsense. You wanna discourage this behaviour – the focus should be on what the application actually does. Sure it will slow down growth, but people will still add cool apps they see on people’s profiles and message their friends about it. Will also mean developers can be sure their userbase is of better quality too – eliminate all those accidental installs and people who are not genuinely interested in using the app regularly
March 27th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Ash, I think it’s in the social networks’ best interests to allow good invitations. It increases engagement for the platform. Even though it’s hard to stop spam, I think it’s a battle that can be won that time.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:04 am
Yeah…invitations should be allowed. While restricting at X/day doesn’t make 100% sense, Facebook’s new approach to an algorithmic solution (while causing uncertainty in the short term) is the right way to solve this…it’s similar to what a number of companies (Google included) do to handle spam – look at the quality of your product and its user base (in this case, the app itself)