Techcrunch is reporting that hi5, the worlds third largest social network, is laying off 10 to 15 percent of their staff. Mike Trigg of hi5, told Techcrunch that the company is hiring at the same time though and there won’t be a significant change in the net number of employees at the company.

hi5’s growth has appeared to stagnate over the past few months based on both comScore data as well as Alexa data. Previously I suggested that the social networking space was practically immune to the recession since users would continue logging on to the internet daily. Additionally, given how early we are in social advertising, I wouldn’t expect budgets to be cut significantly (if at all) within social media.

Instead budgets could even rise as Gary Vaynerchuk suggests in one of his recent personal videos. Honestly, while it’s easy to group layoffs over the past week or two into the recession group, I think any exits that take place in the social networking space during this time should be thoroughly examined. Just because there are departures and potential restructurings, does not mean that the social web economy is going to be substantially impacted.

Conversely, after reading all of the reports by venture capitalists over the past few weeks, it wouldn’t be surprising to see many of the venture backed startups cut back on their spending. The only reason is not based on revenue projections but based on a more challenging environment to raise later rounds of funding. From what Mike Trigg said, it sounds like basic restructuring. I’m interested to see if this trend continues.

Last night hi5 announced the release of a new translations application which is compatible with the OpenSocial standard. The new service is being promoted as the first major translation tool using the OpenSocial standard. I’m not quite sure why the release was phrased this way to be honest. The reality is that this is simply a translations application for hi5.

Given hi5’s international reach, it makes it much more easier to find users willing to translate applications abroad. Two companies that are immediately taking advantage of this new service is RockYou and iLike. While it makes all OpenSocial applications more easily translated, it requires the applications to be accessible on hi5 in order to have them translated.

This application is currently not available on other platforms. hi5 continues to make announcements regarding them being the first to release specific features related to OpenSocial (including the first to implement version 0.8 of the OpenSocial standard) but developers have been complaining. While features are being released, they aren’t always usable and hi5 has been somewhat delayed in rolling out fixes to any issues on the platform.

hi5 continues to roll out new features though and it’s clear that they are taking the platform seriously. If you have an OpenSocial application and are looking to have it translated, you may want to test out hi5’s new translation service.

Today hi5 announced the release of the OpenSocial 0.8 standard which has been in beta for the past few weeks. According to the release, over 1,800 applications have been installed on the platform to date. The most significant change here? The launch of a RESTful API which enables developers to choose their development language rather than being forced into Javascript. This is a huge upgrade for the OpenSocial standard.

Is this a big announcement for OpenSocial? Not necessarily in terms of the standard’s reach but it definitely does imply substantial upgrades from a development perspective. As OpenSocial improves, the standard continues to face challenges in terms of adoption by developers. While the applications on MySpace, hi5 and other platforms appear to be growing rapidly, Facebook continues to dwarf the competition.

While that may not be the case indefinitely, it appears that developers have been pushed to their limits. Take the MySpace Data Availability initiative for instance. It is essentially a copycat of Facebook Connect but was first to launch and while it may be confusing, is supposedly completely functional. So far there has been no word of any large applications that have been launched with the service.

It’s not completely clear why this is the case but it appears that there is much more anticipation surrounding Facebook Connect. The announcement of this new version of OpenSocial may perhaps attract the same sort of response: a congratulatory pat on the back without comparable developer adoption. I could easily be wrong though.

Ali Partovi of iLike for instance has an enthusiastic comment in the press release, “I’m delighted that hi5 is the first Open Social container to release the 0.8 upgrade.” One can only be so excited about a new version of OpenSocial being released though. I think we’re all still waiting on version 1.0 to arrive. Hopefully my negative tone is not taken whole-heartedly.

I believe that this is a significant step for OpenSocial and for hi5. It will be interesting to see how the battle between OpenSocial and the Facebook platform plays out over the coming months.

Today hi5 announced the launch of their mobile service. The social networking site is now available on mobile in 26 different languages. According to a release, users will be able to easily “send and receive messages, update status, view friends’ profiles, share photos, find out who is online and add new friends.” The service has been optimized to run on phones including the Apple iPhone, Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, LG, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.

26 languages on a mobile service is significant as many competing social networks do not currently offer such a wide offering via mobile. hi5 is one of the top social networks globally but still ranks below Facebook and MySpace. The site is growing quickly though and appears to have a relatively large global reach with over 56 million unique visitors each month according to the release.

Mobile is going to increasingly become the center of discussion when it comes to the social web as mobile platforms become ubiquitous. Currently we are still in the early stage of the social/mobile revolution but competition is heating up. Today’s announcement by hi5 only emphasizes the ongoing race to the handset.

In contrast to a downloadable version of the site, the new hi5 service is available directly through mobile web browsers.

Techcrunch is reporting that hi5 has acquired one of the application developers that has built apps on their platform. This is the first time that any application developer has been acquired by a platform owner instead of a third-party company looking to expand their reach.

The company which got acquired, Pixverse, has appeared to develop an interesting chatroom which in addition to chat has the avatars of users moving around the screen. I have included a version of the chat room below. It’s an interesting way to interact. While it’s an interesting technology, I doubt that the company was acquired for that much.

Unfortunately I doubt we’ll ever know the exact number since it wasn’t announced. If you are looking for a fun way to chat while browsing through hi5, this looks like a pretty good solution. Based on this acquisition, I would doubt that we’ll see hi5 launching their own instant messaging solution anytime soon. Conversely, perhaps the acquisition was to expand upon the existing service.

Do you think the chat room below is useful? How much would you pay to acquire it?

While hi5 may not have beat out Facebook for the number one social platform, they have taken the spot of number two. Eric Eldon points out that the hi5 platform has been more successful in attracting users. Rock You, for example, has received a whopping 2 million installations since the launch. Compare this to Myspace where the total number of installations for the top application is just over 100,000. While the hi5 platform doesn’t appear to have launched their application directory yet, the apps have been spreading virally.

hi5 proclaimed that there were unlimited invites for applications at launch hoping to add to their developer base. While there is no word on how many applications have joined the hi5 platform, my guess is that it is still well below 1,000. Eric Eldon also questions the value of many of these applications. Right now there is some debate as to how valuable branded pokes on Facebook and other social networks are. RockYou claims that because millions of users have sent pokes to other users, that there is some marketable value behind all that.

I’d have to see statistics showing that branded pokes have resulted in an increase in sales before I think these marketing campaigns are valuable. As to whether users feel like they have been spammed on hi5, it appears not. Eric Eldon states, “Hi5 has instead come out with a new notification system specifically for applications. This means that there is little risk of users feeling spammed by applications messages, because they can just ignore invites, etc. if they don’t want to deal with it.”

Currently, it is still early in the platform race and it is difficult to declare a winner but hi5 has definitely taken a risk by opening up their platform to make it really viral. MySpace on the other hand has provided practically no viral features aside from displaying in user profiles. Once MySpace opens up their platform a little more, I would look for them to become a viable competitor to Facebook and rapidly surpass hi5.

As I mentioned last week, two platforms will be going live this week. This morning hi5 went live and with it the opportunity to gain rapid traction for your applications. There are absolutely no limits on application invites currently sparking yet another gold rush for application developers. The only difference this time is that OpenSocial is the standard for development making it a little more challenging to rapidly push out a new application.

I have yet to figure out how to install an application but I’ll be sure to let you know when I do! According to hi5 more than 7,700 developers have joined the platform so far and it’s growing rapidly. It has been a big few weeks for OpenSocial and it will continue to be as Orkut is expected to launch this week. This launch is important particularly because this is the first OpenSource-enabled platform to launch with viral distribution channels.

All applications will go through a review process which will be done on a first-come-first-serve basis. As I mentioned the other day, one of the largest challenges with these applications is that they are not as easy to develop as Facebook apps which have an extremely simple library making it easy to rapidly launch new applications. Once the application directory goes live I will be sure to provide a link as we begin tracking the growth of each app.

Update
Below is an image of the unreleased hi5 application directory that was forwarded to me. It will be launched in the coming weeks according to hi5. Applications can currently be installed though and are distributed strictly through existing viral channels.

If managing your applications on three platforms wasn’t already enough for you, two more platforms will be going live next week: Orkut and hi5. While there are few details as to viral distribution on Orkut, hi5 has provided details about their viral distribution channels. Of particular significance is that “there are no limits to how many friends a user can invite.” This sounds similar to the Facebook platform when it launched.

These launches will be more significant than the Bebo launch considering that hi5 and Orkut are the 8th and 10th (respectively) most visited sites on the web according to Alexa.com. With no limits on invitations for friends we may see a similar gold rush to those applications that launched on the Facebook platform. Both platforms will launch using the OpenSocial standard bringing the total number of potential users via OpenSocial far greater than Facebook.

Add together MySpace’s platform and Facebook’s viral distribution channels and hi5 is setting up to be a significant launch. Next week will surely be a big week as the reach of social platforms is set to almost double. For one person, attempting to monitor all the action on all the platforms is extremely challenging but extremely exciting. For development teams building on each of the platforms, being ready for launch on all sites is not only challenging but close to impossible.

This first quarter of this year has been transformational for the social platform space.