Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, hi5 is one of the world's largest social networks. Alexa® ranks hi5 as a top 20 website globally, and as the #1 social network in over 30 countries across Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

hi5 is the most globally diverse social networking site in the world, with over 80% of our users from outside the US. The hi5.com site was designed for this global audience from the beginning, and was the first in-language social networking site in many countries around the world. The site has been translated to over 40 languages and dialects (with more than 60 planned by the end of 2008). Whether delivering locally relevant applications and feature translations, offering in-language customer support, or securing regional media partnerships, we strive to provide services that are inviting, useable and meaningful for people in many different countries and cultures around the world.
How the Service is Used

While circumstances and geography can separate individuals from one another, hi5 helps its members stay connected with friends, family and others that are important to them in a simple, fun and safe online environment. Through the service (which adjusts to deliver information pertinent to each user), members link to people they’ve known throughout their lives, while making and maintaining new acquaintances as well. They use hi5 to share photos, send messages, express themselves with profile pages, join discussion groups, explore music and videos, and more — making it easier to learn about what’s happening in the lives of the people they care about, regardless of where they live or work.

In supporting this valuable communication, hi5 is also committed to protecting the privacy of its members. The service offers a range of privacy settings and controls that enable members to select how they are viewed and how their information flows through the system.
The Technology Behind hi5

hi5 operates one of the largest commercial OLTP PostgreSQL installations in the world across hundreds of database and storage servers. Our unique systems store billions of friend relationships and instantly make this information available. To support the network’s global reach and a breadth of third party applications, hi5 uses a combination of open source and home grown technologies to deliver a highly available, highly scalable infrastructure on economical Linux servers. hi5 has also adopted Open Social – a common set of APIs developed by Google – to support the rapid development and rollout of more social networking applications for hi5 members.
Leadership

hi5 was founded by Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO, and Akash Garg, CTO. The company is led by a diverse group of business and technology executives with extensive experience in building successful online properties.