hi5 Acquires PixVerse

Social network hi5 announced yesterday that it had acquired PixVerse. PixVerse, founded in 2007, has previously released social networking apps, like a PixWall, PixPoke, or PixChat, that add on to the features of networks like hi5 and Facebook, so I haven't really been following it. More shame me.

When the company launched its blog in January, it labeled itself as "a virtual world embeddable wherever you happen to live online" and hi5's press release describes it as "an innovative provider of rich, real-time interactions within social networks. Built on its breakthrough Flash™-based, no-download virtual world platform." It looks like hi5 may be more interested in the real-time interaction, perhaps to keep up with Facebook's recently integrated chat, but this could be an interesting move.

“PixVerse has great technology that delivers a very immersive end user experience,”  Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of hi5, said in a statement. “Communicating with friends is one of the primary benefits of hi5, and this technology and team enables hi5 to deliver a much richer, more visual medium of interaction for users of our network.” 

That to me is the potential benefit of integrating virtual worlds with social networks. Most people I know are interested in the social network as a way to stay in touch over a long period of time in quick bursts of asynchronous communication, not catch up with their extended friends list in a quick chat. But, frankly, my Facebook account is probably a better indication of who I know (though maybe not of who I'm close to or work with) than my Skype, Gchat, or Second Life friends list.

That seems to be the impetus behind the multiple virtual worlds and platforms working to create integrated apps with social networks, but I'm particularly interested in how this one plays out through an acquisition now.

"When we set out to build our applications, we were immediately drawn to the hi5 platform,” said Charles Ying, co-founder of PixVerse. “Access to the social graph enabled us to leverage hi5’s 80 million users to drive our growth. And the fact that hi5 is part of OpenSocial, rather than a proprietary platform, meant our work was extensible and reusable.”

Details of the acquisition were not announced.

Comments

[Claude Gelinas]

The purchase makes sense — let's hope Hi5 knows how to fully take advantage of the PixVerse technologies.