As Friendster has recently started promoting third party applications, the company sent out an e-mail recommending music applications and 3-D avatars for their users. The music applications are powered by Qloud’s myMusic and imeem. The 3-D avatars are powered by Meez.

For Meez’s 3-D avatars, users can set the clothes, body style, and hair. After that, the avatars can be animated and embedded into any profile page. The music applications immediately ask the users which songs they would like to embed. The music applications has some preselected songs that the user can have embedded on the site or gives the option to play music that is connected to one’s music collection iTunes or Windows Media Player using a plug-in. Nifty.

I think the way that Friendster is opening up applications is much more organized than Facebook. Friendster seems to be more knit-picky about the types of applications that are added. The Facebook approach was more of a shoot first, ask questions later approach. I guess between social networks, each one seems to be learning from each other in some way. Back when Facebook first started, they were knit-picky about where the users actually came from. The exclusivity of Facebook’s initial user-base was their core competency and gave them enough time to prepare for scaling a large user-base.

hi5 Networks Inc., Qloud, and iLike have collaborated using Google’s OpenSocial software to deliver two new music applications.  The two new applications will leverage hi5’s 70 million user count to provide the service that is similar to Facebook’s iLike music application.  These two applications are the first to use OpenSocial to go live on hi5.

“We are very pleased to increase the depth of our music offering for our members around the world, making it easier for them to find, listen to and post more of the music they like on their hi5 profiles.”
“These collaborations with iLike and Qloud really demonstrate how well the OpenSocial initiative can make it simpler for developers to build useful, fun and engaging applications for hi5 users.”

-Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO and Co-Founder of hi5 Networks.

The iLike application will give hi5 users the ability to embed songs and videos within their profiles.  And the Qloud My Music application will allow users to legally play songs and videos directly from their iTunes libraries within their profiles.

hi5 is based in San Francisco, Calif. and started in 2003.  The iLike hi5 music application is also available in Spanish.