I’m at the Community Next platform in Sunnyvale California. While there had been rumors of competing social networks working on launching platforms similar to Facebook’s, one of the chief developers of the Hi5 website has confirmed that they are indeed preparing to launch a platform. The time-frame in launching the platform is 8 to 12 months for completion of the platform. Given the large amount of time necessary to develop a platform, Facebook has a huge lead on the competition.

Hi5 is currently the 3rd largest network on the web so this is pretty significant. Just as when MySpace launches their competing platform, you can expect a number of developers to rapidly shift to Hi5 when they launch their platform. Momentarily I will be posting a video of Akash’s presentation at the CommunityNext event.