XIHA Life, a site that calls itself “the world’s first truly multilingual social network”, has launched in the United States. The site is geared towards multilingual users who feel constrained by the single language networks offered by sites like Facebook (while most social networks have begun integrating foreign languages, they limit themselves to one language at a time).
While the site does cater to an international audience, it isn’t “multilingual” in the sense that it breaks down language barriers – the site doesn’t have any translation features. Instead, users tell tell the site what languages they know (and which ones they prefer), and the site will only present the messages or posts each user understands. In my own testing, the system for designating preferred languages worked well enough – after entering English and Spanish as my favorites, I rarely saw anything I couldn’t understand.
Xiha Life offers a number of features similar to those found on MySpace (like a dedicated music site, which launches today), but Jani Penttinen, the company’s Chairman and CTO, says that XIHA is not designed as an alternative to these established sites, but is more like another channel for bands and users to reach one another.
XIHA is currently getting around 500,000 monthly users worldwide (a minuscule number compared to the most popular social networks), but is targeting a large niche that has largely gone unaddressed. Penttinen says that there are 37 million multilingual speakers in the United States alone, with obviously many times that number abroad.
XIHA stands little chance at becoming the next major social network – there may be a large number of people who like communicating in different languages, but most of these people are probably comfortable on an existing network and are unlikely to switch just for diversity. But for users looking to communicate with friends across a number of different countries (or who’d just like to improve their language skills), it serves its niche audience well.
ya i m still join with xihalife.com
Man is that site fugly. No attention to negative space, gradients everywhere…..
YETANOTHERSOICIALNETWORK. Ugh!!!
Multilingual is a feature not compelling enough to bank on whatsoever.
Do not collect 1 million users, go straight to the Deadpool.
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? XIHA Life- “the world’s first truly multilingual social network” [VOTE] – http://www.thri...rfail.com/dff0a
Geof, relax… take a deep breath. It’s not like you’re part of the target group (my guess) anyway, but you can choose no-color, no-gradient design for your profile if you choose to. Multilingual not being compelling – not sure where that comes from? I mean, zero to half a million in less than a year with no advertising… someone *has* to like it. XIHA is actually not even trying to be “something for everyone”, so it’s quite obvious it won’t work for everyone quite as well. But oh well… you’re entitled to your opinion.
Why we are so -eve about social networking sites… we are not paying a dime… well of-course the time if we decide to explore…
BTW I don’t really agree with the statement “but most of these people are probably comfortable on an existing network and are unlikely to switch just for diversity”.
I think every product/service has a life cycle not that fb or myspace will be going to deadpool in the next 15 years…
but we don’t know the next social portal might take the page hits out from fb and myspace.
Congratulations, Jani, on your US launch. Nice amount of users you have there and always good to see another startup based in Finland reaching out. The language recognition is actually something I’d like to see at other sites too. Now that you introduced me to the idea I’ve been frustrated that this technology isn’t everywhere. Perhaps offering it to others is an additional approach to consider.
Good luck. We had a great run at http://www.phrasebase.com, which is also a multilingual social network, but with the additional purpose of connecting people for language exchange partnerships. But the question becomes… ok, now what? If someone has an answer to that, please do tell me.
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
The question is “is this bootstrapped ?” or do you have outsider funding ? and by the way your growth is solid and steady the way to go
http://www.quan...om/xihalife.com
jeff: compete.com monitors US traffic, which represents something like 3-4% of the XIHA Life total… no reason to stare those numbers. For a site with global audience it’s better to use Google Trends, which shows we have a totally different case than you guys: http://trends.g...=all&sort=0 … it doesn’t seem to count all visitors, so the actual daily counts it shows are quite a bit lower than they are in reality, and the geographical distribution is not quite right, but the trend is pretty correct.
jas: bootstrapped… initial funding by the founders and there’s actually nice revenue coming in from content sales so making profit is not many months away at this point.
Kristoffer: Thanks for your comments, appreciated!
Just one thing the name for people that can speak 4 languages or more is “polyglot”!