Ramu Yalamanchi
Ramu Yalamanchi is an American entrepreneur. He founded the social networking web site hi5 and is its CEO. hi5 is one of the largest social networking sites in the World, the #1 social networking service for the Spanish speaking market, and a top 10 site in 20 countries across the globe. During college, Ramu was a partner at SponsorNet New Media. Ramu received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.Features
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.Some users opt to make their profiles available for everyone on hi5 to view. Other users exercise the option to make their profile viewable only to those people who are in their network. The network of friends consists of a user's direct friends (1st degree), the friends of those direct friends (2nd degree) and the friends of the friends of direct friends (3rd degree).
Market share
While hi5 maintains its hold in Central America, it faces tough competition elsewhere in the world from many social networking sites.
As of 2007, hi5 is the leading social networking site in a number of diverse countries including:
Social web
The Social Web refers to two different, yet related concepts. The first is as a description of web 2.0 technologies that are focused on social interaction and community before anything else. The second is a proposal for a future network similar to the World Wide Web.
The social web as a current description
The social web is a term that can be used to describe a subset of interactions that are highly social, conversational and participatory .
Examples include Twitter, Facebook, and Jaiku.
The features of social web applications include:
- Expressing and developing identity (especially for youth).
- Relationships
- Trust
- User-driven and generated sites and content
The first is an open global distributed data sharing network similar to today's World Wide Web, except instead of linking documents, the Social Web will link people, organizations, and concepts.
The use of the term in this context was introduced in a July 2004 paper called "The Social Web: Building an Open Social Network with XDI" published in the PlaNetwork Journal by members of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee.
The Social Web paper explains how the introduction of a new protocol for distributed mediated data sharing and synchronization, XDI, could enable a new layer of trusted data interchange applications. The key building blocks for this layer are I-names and I-numbers (based on the OASIS XRI specifications), Dataweb pages, and link contracts.
Perhaps the best analogy for the Social Web is the worldwide banking and credit card system. This infrastructure has evolved over centuries to facilitate the global exchange of a very sensitive form of data — money — by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — banks. The Social Web takes the same approach for exchange of private, sensitive information by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — i-brokers.
The Universalization of the Virtual Identity Virtual Rights, a new Legal Entity: the Virtual Identity, and a new Fundamental Right: Not to have or have a Virtual Identity are also closely related to the Social Web.
Earlier uses of the term include:
- In 1998 the term "Social Web" was introduced in an article by Peter Hoschka in a related context to describe the shift from using computers and the web as simple cooperation tools to using the computer as a social medium.In 1955 the term "Social Web" was introduced by Arthur C. Krey in the essay collection History and the Social Web published by the University of Minnesota press.
