Spotlight: Hi5

Hi5.com

This network was pretty average, allowing users to create a profile, post pictures, comments, etc., etc.  you know the drill.

The layout was also pretty plain; white background, black and blue text, but spiced up a bit with all the game and quiz taking options.

Aside from all this boring, usual stuff though, I did find some unique features.

This network felt more childish to me than the other networks I came across, mostly because of the features.  For example, for some features you needed to have a certain number of coins, and I found that was one of the main things on your profile; How many coins you have. 

Well I had 0, being new to the site, which was no fun.  I learned that you can buy coins, or play games, or 'download' certain applications to gain more coins. 

The other thing that made the site feel immature was the huge game features on it.  It almost felt like more of a gaming network than social network (but maybe that's because I had no friends to be social with). 

Making an 'Avatar' for yourself was a main option as soon as you created your profile, but I didn't find that many people actually created an Avatar when I was browsing for friends. 

After requesting a few random people to be friends, I logged on an hour later and got really excited because it said I had 11 Friend Suggestions.   Thinking this was like friend requests, I thought these people wanted to be my friend, so I selected add friend for all of them.  However, I found out it was actually just a suggestion.  Hi5 was saying since you want to be Hanna's friend then do you want to add Mark as a friend too? Needless to say, I was very disappointed after figuring this out.

One thing I noticed, this site had the most diverse users, with the exception of Skyrock, that I have seen yet.  It seemed like people from a number of countries were on this network rather than focused in one part of the world.

This could be a result of the Google Translation feature on every page.  This was awesome for me because if I stumbled across a profile or page that was in another language, I hit the google translation button it reloaded the page in English for me!

 Before the translation

Give this button a push

And Voila (no pun intended)

So it doesn't translate exact, but not everyone is perfect!  It works well enough to get an idea of what they're saying.

 Giving 'fives' to friends was something I could related to with the Facebook 'poke' feature, but other than that, this site had an overwhelming amount of games and restrictions because of my zero coins, broke, balance and lack of friends once again.