Hi5

» see hi5.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

hi5 launched on 27 june 2003. it was founded by ramu yalamanchi, an indian-american entrepreneur in mountain view. the structure was the same as friendster and what would become myspace: profiles, friends, photos, comments. the difference was where it took off.

in turkey, hi5 was the social network from about 2005 to 2009. every high school student had a hi5 profile. every university student had one. older relatives had one because their kids made them sign up. profile pages had auto-playing turkish pop music (tarkan, teoman, sezen aksu, manga). the comment threads on photos were where most of your social drama took place. the friend ranking system, where you ordered your top friends, was a daily political situation.

i was around for all of this and never made a hi5 profile. i was older than the main audience by the time it peaked here, and the few friends' pages i saw felt like glitter-gif walls and auto-playing midi-style mp3s and a top-friends ranking i did not want to play. msn was where my actual conversations were. by the time i would have signed up out of curiosity, facebook had launched in turkish and the migration was already happening. i went from msn to facebook and skipped hi5 entirely. apparently i missed something but i do not feel the loss.

by 2010 facebook had launched its turkish localization properly. people started moving over. by 2011 hi5 was already mostly empty in turkey. it was bought by tagged in december 2011. the new owners kept the brand limping along as a gaming-focused site for a few more years. it was finally consolidated and effectively turned off around 2018.

~ the record ~

~ why it was big in specific places ~

hi5's user-base distribution was unusual. while myspace dominated north america and bebo dominated UK and ireland, hi5 found audiences in latin america, central asia, north africa, and parts of southern europe. the strongest markets were mexico, romania, turkey, mongolia, tunisia, peru, and parts of central africa.

there were several reasons. hi5 had local-language interfaces earlier than facebook. it ran lighter on slow connections, which mattered in markets where most people were on dial-up or weak DSL. it had a photo-forward layout that worked well in cultures where visual self-presentation mattered more than text. these were small advantages that compounded into a real audience for a few years.

in turkey specifically, hi5 hit the right age group at the right time. internet penetration was rapidly increasing in turkey from 2003 to 2008. that wave of new users went onto hi5 because it was the social network that worked in turkish, on slow connections, and that their friends were on. once the network effect set in, it took facebook a couple of years to flip it.

~ the profile page ~

the typical 2007 turkish hi5 profile page had a custom background (often a stretched photo of a band, a movie poster, or a cartoon), an auto-playing music track, a few profile photos, the friend list, and a long comment thread.

the comment thread on a hi5 profile was a different shape from the facebook wall that came later. comments on hi5 were public to everyone but deeply personal in tone. you would write something cryptic and emotional on someone's profile that everyone would read. the convention was something like a private letter posted on a bulletin board. weird shape, real social meaning.

the friend ranking system was one of hi5's most-loved and most-fought-over features. you could put your friends in a specific order. people would notice the order. moving someone down was a public statement. moving someone up was a public statement. fights between friends would sometimes be visible just from looking at the order changes on each other's profiles.

~ how it lost turkey ~

facebook localized properly to turkish around 2008-2009. the migration from hi5 to facebook in turkey happened over about eighteen months. it was driven by the usual network-effect dynamics. the more friends you had on facebook, the less reason to log into hi5. by mid-2010 most turkish users had stopped checking hi5 entirely.

hi5's response was to pivot to gaming. in november 2009 they announced they would become a "casual gaming platform." this was supposed to be a way to compete with facebook's growing games section, but for hi5's existing users it just felt like the site they had built their identity on was being repurposed into something they did not want.

the gaming pivot did not save hi5. tagged bought the company in december 2011 for an undisclosed amount that was reportedly modest. tagged kept hi5 running as a smaller property. the original profile-and-friends part of the site was effectively over by then.

~ what we lost ~

the auto-playing music profile page. modern social profiles are silent. the 2006-2008 hi5 profile that loaded with three seconds of teoman or 50 cent or sezen aksu was a different shape. you announced your taste before you announced anything else. nobody does this anymore. soundcloud profiles tried to be this and were not.

the friend ranking. nobody has a friend ranking now. instagram has a "close friends" toggle which is technically similar but is private. the hi5 ranking was public. the publicity was the point. it forced people to make actual decisions about who their actual close friends were, in front of everyone.

the cultural moment. for a specific generation in turkey, hi5 was high school and the early years of university. the things that happened on hi5 were the things that happened in your life. the comments on your photos were people you actually knew talking about you. when facebook took over, that intimacy got slightly diluted. hi5 was the last social network where everyone was someone you would actually run into in person.

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