Social network sites are a very powerful tool, to meet open minded people online. Social network hi5 is initiating an instant messaging service, hi5 IM, adding up real-time communication for user. hi5 IM akin to Facebook Chat, Facebook’s instant messaging attribute, displays to users which all friends in their network are online and runs directly in any hi5 user’s browser. Besides one-on-one chat, users can alter their status; keep friends posted, post profile annotations and share photos as well via hi5 IM.

Allegedly the social network is upgrading its “entertainment features” to achieve more users and also hub on attracting users though casual gaming and micro-payments. Hi5 also lately partnered with Paymo to power mobile payments for virtual goods. The social network is on tenterhooks that real-time chat will also accolade casual games and interaction with other content on the social network.

hi5 IM also facilitate users to share and convey their emotions by the means of animated hi5 “star” emoticons. Developed from the hi5 logo; the star symbolize an array of virtual gestures and emotions, such as sad, happy, laughing, crying, playing dead, angry and shy. This self-described “world’s leading social entertainment web site,” dig up a new CEO, Bill Gossman, formerly the CEO of the online advertising service Audience Science, the previous month. Subsequent to its failure to materialize a new round of funding, the social network hi5 cut a large percentage of its staff at the end of March.

hi5 has a fine sized addressees, nearly 60 million active users, but yet far behind the big boys in the social networking space, MySpace and Facebook. Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide with 294.7 million distinctive visitors, with MySpace coming in second with 125.7 million unique visitors. hi5 gets about 63 million monthly unique visits worldwide but only 3.7 million of those are from the U.S., as per the ComScore’s March stats.