We were asked to join another social media network outside of those that we use everyday. I joined Hi5. For those of you who think that Hi5 is just a gesture, I thought I would give a brief description of what the website is really about. According to Wikipedia, Hi5 is a social networking website. It is currently the twenty-fifth most popular website according to Alexa, a website-usage information website. In Hi5, users create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown and upload user pictures where users can post comments. Hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he or she may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person's friend list and vice-versa.
After poking around for a bit, this is my analysis:
-There is a lot of advertising on Hi5, every other time you click or move from profile to profile, some sort of pop up advertisement comes up. This gets very irritating. I've never encountered something like this on a social media website.
-The search option is hard to use. I tried to find some friends that were using Hi5 after i completed my profile, and it was very difficult to determine who people were. Plus the results that returned were not really related to what I had tried to search.
-Hi5 similar to facebook. It has many of the same features and options. However, since I've been on facebook since high school, I don't see the benefit in switching sites. Plus, not many online users even know what Hi5 is, thus I would be that loser who doesn't have a lot of friends.
Overall, I think that Hi5 is not a very user friendly site. I think it has some potential, however, I don't see people using it instead of facebook.
