Hi5.com

Advantages: its popular with certain ages groups, easy to use

Disadvantages: popularity means abusers + facebook strong competition

---history and intro to hi5------

Hi5 is the 11th most popular website in the world, myspace and orkut.com being the only 2 social networking sites to be more popular.
hi5 was founded by Ramu Yalamanchi who is also the current CEO
hi5 basically allows you to 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

According to hi5 they receive over 18 million unique users per month!!!
and have over 50 million members, From Miami to Mumbai, Lima to Lisbon, Sydney to San Francisco, 'hi5 is the place where young people come to stay in touch with friends, meet new people, create & explore content, and express themselves. '

In terms of misuse hi5 seems alright, there are a few who put porn on their images when its against the rules but apart from the odd few its quite alright. I have noticed it is getting more popular as strange people add me as friends/send me comments.

Hi5 have now allowed you to personalise your profile, like using html coding, so people now have mouse effects and videos playing on their profile. Hi5 also allow you to have music tracks playing on your profile.
Hi5 have created groups like according to schools attended etc, intending to re-unite old friends, has that happened? well yes actually I've met many old primary school friends again through hi5 and its great to see how they've turned out.
On hi5 you can see the people who have visited your profile, you can also search for people, keep a journal, scrapbook etc.
People can leave comments on your hi5 personal page and can also leave photo comments. (Which you can accept or reject)
People can also give each other 'fives' like for example categories include cute, best friend, handsome etc.

The main competitors to hi5 are facebook.com - very popular with university students - infact there was a recent article that students on facebook were discussing exam papers or something and that they were going to be investigated.
Other sites include bebo, orkut and many more.
They are all extremely similar, facebook however looks quite unique as you can draw pictures on peoples 'walls' - (equivalent of giving comments on their comment page)

Summary: Hi5 is a great social networking site that is increasing in popularity daily. Do you use Hi5?