Inside Facebook

While hi5 already has tremendous reach in South America, Europe, and Asia, apparently 23 languages are not enough. Starting today, hi5 is announcing the launch of its crowd-sourced translation service that will allow users to translate hi5 into any local language. In addition, hi5 will soon be making this service available to developers who want to translate their applications as well.

Since its launch earlier this year, Facebook Translations has spurred on significant international growth for the primarily English-speaking social network. While hi5 has been translating its site for a long time, the company hopes to push further down the long tail of languages around the world.

I sat down with Mukund Bhagavan, hi5’s Director of Strategy & Operations, and Greg Holmes, hi5’s Localization Manager, to discuss the details of the Hi5 translation program.

Mukund and Greg, With hi5 already professionally translated in so many languages, what is your vision for crowd-sourcing more translations of hi5?

Mukund: Our goal is to make hi5 accessible in all languages. Today, hi5 is available in 23 languages, but there is a long tail of languages we haven’t yet started to reach in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.  We also want to expand our offering in Spanish speaking countries - today, we just have Castilian and Argentinian. We really want users to see hi5 as part of their local community.

Greg: For us, it’s all about speed and quality of translations.   As far as quality goes, authenticity and natural voice is important.  For example, addressing all of the regional Spanishes is very important to us.  There’s a lot of pent up demand - we want to remove language as a barrier to hi5 usage.

So will you use a purely crowd-sourced model?

Greg: We’ve been incorporating feedback from our translation partner, Lionbridge, with whom we’ve been working for a long time.  We’ll keep working with them - they handle key parts of the translation, and create the glossary for volunteers.

As far as the volunteer experience goes, we’re using an in-context translation model.  Users can vote on others’ translations, and once translations get enough votes, it goes to the editor for approval.

The hi5 user base is very international, but most developers can’t afford to translate their apps into many languages. How will it work for developers who want to translate their apps on Hi5?

Greg: For developers, there’s a similar in-context interaction model.  The highest quality translations come in context.  We want to make it as seamless as possible.  We’re working with the OpenSocial standards group to develop these particular standards further.  Developers just have to meet the OpenSocial [i18n] spec for internationalizing their apps, and they will then be able to leverage the Hi5 translation community.

Thanks guys. Any last thoughts?

Mukund: The rollout is starting today, and will be live in the next several days.  Our goal is to add 30 more languages this year.  And tools will be available to the developer community soon.

Google hosted the OpenSocial Summit today at its home offices in Mountain View to discuss the state of the OpenSocial API and the roadmap for version 0.8.  Amongst the many presentations by containers and app developers, Hi5 shared some very interesting stats on the Hi5 Platform.

These are some of the first detailed stats on the Hi5 Platform to be released - Hi5 doesn’t publish installs in the app gallery.

Hi5 Platform Totals

• 617 applications
• 1 million total daily installs
• 14 apps have been installed on more than 1 million profiles
• 6.5 million total daily canvas page views
• 9 apps with more than 10 million total canvas page views so far

Amongst Active Users

• 3.7 apps on average
• 52% have at least one app
• Max apps installed by any one user is 23

Shindig Stats

• >15 billion requests served
• 10k requests/second
• 35 servers total

If the Platform Rush of ’07 was about creating APIs for third party developers to build applications on social networks, the Platform Rush of ’08 is about extending those platforms to the rest of the open web.

Before May of 2007, it was impossible for third parties to build anything on Facebook. At the same time, MySpace was kicking third parties off the site left and right, disabling off-site clicks in Flash widgets, and generally wanting to own the entire experience itself.

My, how things have changed quickly. On Thursday, MySpace announced a Data Availability initiative that will allow users to share profile data and friend lists via their REST API with OAuth authentication. In a curiously timed Friday afternoon release, Facebook announced its Facebook Connect initiative which will allow third party websites to access Facebook users’ profile data and friend lists (consistent with users’ Facebook privacy settings) via new Facebook Platform APIs and authentication. And on Monday, Google is rumored to be announcing an OpenSocial initiative called Friend Connect, which will do much of the same thing (though perhaps with more restrictions).

Social networks have had so much success “platformizing” themselves over the last year that they are now rushing to embed themselves into a new “social” layer that sits beneath the rest of the Internet. The hope is that where a person’s profile is, there his trust will be also. By enabling users to share their profile data, friend lists, and privacy settings with applications all over the web – not just with applications on Facebook.com or MySpace.com – social networks will enable new classes of web applications that take advantage of the deeper social context never before available to almost everyone else. And thereby, in the process, make themselves an increasingly important part of the Internet’s infrastructure.

Why? Infrastructure plays usually have different business models than $.10 CPMs.

As many developers have noticed over the last week, the Hi5 Platform has been suffering repeated downtime. As the Hi5 team shared in a blog post last night, the source of the problem was a technical issue related to the way Hi5 was processing notifications. As a result, Hi5 for a brief period turned off all platform notifications. As Paul Lindner, architect of the Hi5 Platform, wrote:

We underestimated the amount of notifications sent, and the popularity of their use on the site.  At first glance this just meant that posting and browsing notifications were slow.  We didn’t expect that other requests would suffer collateral damage.

However, Hi5 has since restored platform notification service to developers by making some changes to the way notifications work. Specifically, notifications are now processed asynchronously.  In addition, Hi5 instituted the following changes:

• A new notification retention policy removes the oldest notifications from the system (14 day max)
• Only notification REST calls with a token generated in the preceding 4 hours are allowed

Hi5 will be continuing conversations with developers that are using notifications the most.

It’s been many weeks in the making, but we at Inside Facebook have some exciting news to share today - we are launching a new, experimental second blog called Inside Social Games! Inside Social Games is going to be entirely devoted to tracking the convergence of games and social network platforms.

So what are social games anyway - and why Inside Social Games now? Just as I was surprised two years ago by the way my “non-geeky” friends were using Facebook, I’m finding myself repeatedly being surprised by the way those same people are playing new kinds of “social games” inside Facebook (and MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, and Orkut) now. Games that, despite their apparent simplicity or complexity, are being adopted in large numbers by people outside traditional console, PC, and online gaming demographics. Games on social networks are bringing together family and friends like games never before have - and we think that’s pretty darn cool.

Like Inside Facebook two years ago, I’m starting Inside Social Games as an experiment. An experiment into what “social gaming” really means and how social games may or may not be changing the way large numbers of people play and communicate. What the results will be, I’m not yet sure, but I’m excited to see what conversations emerge over the coming weeks and months, especially between the game design and SNAP communities.

I’m proud to announce that I’ve been able to land Chris Holt (also of PC Gamer) to review current and new releases. Chris would love to receive tips on new games, so feel free to contact him at submit AT insidesocialgames DOT com to let him know what you’re up to.

We’re looking forward to tracking not only the games but also the people and companies behind them that are leading the charge into this new and exciting space. We believe some interesting new companies will be created as the worlds of gaming and social networks collide. It should be a fun ride. Please drop us a line any time!

This morning at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco I moderated the Comparing Social Platforms panel, which was comprised of awesome folks speaking on behalf of the top social platforms on the web today:

• Allen Hurff, SVP of Engineering at MySpace
• Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook
• Jessica Alter, Director of Platform and Business Development at Bebo
• Patrick Chanezon, OpenSocial Evangelist at Google
• David Recordon, Open Platform Lead at Six Apart

While the panel covered a variety topics that each merit more discussion (there are entire conferences devoted to doing just that), this morning the panel discussed key issues for the social platform economy - such as each platform’s philosophy on key product integration points (profile, feeds, viral channels), aligning user and developer interests (engagement, marketing channels), monetization roadmap (ad networks, commerce), data portability, and potential business conflicts (in verticals like photos and music).

Since I was moderating the panel, I didn’t have time to take notes, but here are some paraphrases of some noteworthy panelist comments:

• Jessica Alter: We’re going to be driving developers to focus more and more on engagement. While I don’t have any specific announcements today, things like time spent and page views are going to become more important on the platform.
• Allen Hurff: On the question of verticals like music, of course MySpace is going to continue to work with major music distribution partners around the world. But we really want to remain as agnostic as possible. In fact, I expect there to be many more app feed items than MySpace system feed items.
• Dave Morin: We’re spending a lot of our time right now thinking about data portability, or perhaps it would better be called “privacy portability.” You should have the option to have your privacy settings follow you around the web.
• David Recordon: The term “data portability” almost can’t be used in that way any more, since the branding of the term now means something else.
• Patrick Chanezon: Unlike most of these social platforms, iGoogle is much more of a social content discovery service than social network. It’s a pretty different type of service that’s built on OpenSocial that we think is really interesting.
• Allen Hurff: The MySpace Platform actually represents a pretty big shift just in the last year from the way MySpace has traditionally viewed opening up its data. We’re going to push this even further in 2008.
• Dave Morin: Creating a platform is like creating a marketplace. You have your arbitrageurs, and we have those, you have your hedge funds, they’re like the guys staying up all night finding ways to tweak their way into the viral channels more.
• Patrick Chanezon: OpenSocial is really just an overlap of the most common set of services needed to run social applications. We may begin to see platforms on top of platforms in the coming year.

Despite the early start time (8:30!), by midway through the panel there were folks crowding in the back of the room. We only had time for a couple audience questions before we had to make room for the next panel. Thanks to everyone for a great discussion! For more, check out GSP East.

Update: Here’s a video of the panel, thanks to Simon Chen:

Web 2.0 Expo SF is happening this week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center - hard to believe it’s already here! This year, there are several excellent focus tracks on different days of the week, including Social Platforms, Marketing & Community, and the Mobile Web.

I’ll be moderating Wednesday’s session on Comparing Social Platforms, which kicks off the day’s Focus on Social Platforms track. I am honored to be joined by a terrific panel:

• Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook
• Allen Hurff, SVP of Engineering at MySpace
• Jessica Alter, Director of Platform and Business Development at Bebo
• David Recordon, Open Platform Lead at Six Apart

Look forward to seeing you there!

Although it’s only been a few weeks since te Hi5 Platform launched (and MySpace’s Platform hasn’t even officially launched yet), developers are seeing big new growth - especially on Hi5.

Applications have been growing quickly since the Hi5 Platform opened to all users 2 weeks ago.  Eric Eldon reports that RockYou’s SuperFive app has been installed over 2 million times during that period - numbers that rival the “wild west” days following the launch of the Facebook Platform almost one year ago. Hi5, in an effort to preserve equality amongst developers in the early days of the Platform, is still ordering apps in the Hi5 gallery randomly, and not showing install counts in the gallery at all.

Meanwhile, the MySpace platform team has been busy building a new viral mechanism of their own — Post To. Post To allows apps to send content directly to different parts of a user’s profile page, where it can be discovered by their friends. Check out this sample application from the MySpace team which illustrates how Post To and other MySpace viral channels work. However, while many apps are live in the MySpace application gallery, the fully featured MySpace platform is still yet to launch.

While the Facebook Platform undergoes a chapter of maturity, the Hi5 and MySpace platforms are just getting going. We’ll keep close track of how developers are faring as each platform evolves.

One of the challenges of launching a social networking application platform is engendering a sense of equal opportunity for success on the platform amongst developers. While Hi5, MySpace, and others have largely achieved this by allowing developers equal access to the “sandbox” for a number of weeks, Hi5 has taken the additional step of randomizing the order of applications in the Hi5 app gallery. Instead of ranking apps by reach, Hi5 is giving all apps equal exposure until it determines an “engagement metric” to order applications by. Zach at Hi5 writes,

Our ultimate goal is to provide the richest, most engaging experience to our users.  To this end, we plan on offering application developers a variety of incentives/penalties for providing a positive/negative user experience…

At launch we do not have much data to work with, so we decided to provide a randomized application gallery until we have enough data to provide a meaningful sort order of applications.  We feel that this will provide the most level playing field initially and let the applications speak for themselves.

As soon as we switch over to using metrics to determine the sort order, we will offer an explanation as to how you can improve your engagement score.  The general guidelines we will follow should be fairly self-explanatory.  Actions such as installs, views and accepted invites will be positive influences, while rejected invites, blocked applications and removes will be negative influences.

Hi5 is earning high marks from the developer community for its Platform efforts so far.

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.