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"A few weeks ago, we interviewed Lou Moore and Anil Dharni over at Hi5 to talk about a few of the milestones they've achieved since the launch of the OpenSocial developer platform compliance.\u00A0 One of the recurring topics every time I get the chance to speak with someone from Hi5 is the unusually diverse demographic they serve, and the interesting side benefits that come from that.\nOne of those side benefits they brought up during our last conversation was the plans to engage in a formal crowd-sourced translation service. They're already regularly engaged in crowd-sourcing translation so as to more rapidly develop applications and features for their service, but as Justin Smith over at InsideFacebook discussed with Mukund Bhagavan, hi5\u2019s Director of Strategy &amp; Operations, and Greg Holmes, hi5\u2019s Localization Manager today, they're working more closely with the community these days (as well as their professional translation partner Lionbridge) to roll out the site this year in 30 new languages:\nOur goal is to make hi5 accessible in all languages. Today, hi5 is available in 23 languages, but there is a long tail of languages we haven\u2019t yet started to reach in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.\u00A0 We also want to expand our offering in Spanish speaking countries - today, we just have Castilian and Argentinian. We really want users to see hi5 as part of their local community.\nThe hi5 user base is very international, but most developers can\u2019t afford to translate their apps into many languages. How will it work for developers who want to translate their apps on Hi5?\nFor developers, there\u2019s a similar in-context interaction model.\u00A0 The highest quality translations come in context.\u00A0 We want to make it as seamless as possible.\u00A0 We\u2019re working with the OpenSocial standards group to develop these particular standards further.\u00A0 Developers just have to meet the OpenSocial [i18n] spec for internationalizing their apps, and they will then be able to leverage the Hi5 translation community.\nIt's exciting to see the ground being broken by the always innovative folks at Hi5, and seeing that potential benefit the larger social networking family through OpenSocial integration and standards.\nThis is one of the topics that Anil and Lou went into with their conversation with me.\u00A0 To hear more about it, the embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.\nNever miss an episode of Mashable Conversations with these links: Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here. Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating).Add directly to your Zune here.\nAre you a regular listener to Mashable Conversations? Consider filling out our Listener Survey.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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