The most notable things about Hi5's platform launch are these:

• The company will turn on limited "viral messaging" from the start - up to 100 friends can be notified of an action. That's been what spread apps around Facebook but no other OpenSocial container has turned this option on yet.
• Hi5 has a a large audience almost entirely outside of the MySpace/Facebook crowd. Adam Ostrow cites the following stats from the company: "despite having a reported 80 million users, hi5 claims that it has only 25% active user overlap with any other top social networks."

• Hi5's strong presence in Latin America has been evident throughout the preparation of the platform. In addition to free translation of the first 100 approved apps, the company also provided dual locations for its last hackathon event. While 200 developers met and worked together one afternoon this month in Mountain View, CA - another 80 did the same in Mexico City. That's great. The Web 2.0 community pays far too little attention to Latin America, other than scoffing about Orkut's popularity in Brazil - the 5th most populous country in the world! Here at RWW we have substantial international readership, our site was founded in New Zealand and we can't wait for more substantive international integration of innovators.

Most Platform Apps Still Suck

Unfortunately, these platforms are not delivering the important innovation they've promised. When Mark Zuckerberg launched the Facebook Platform he said it was going to be like a new Operating System. That's only true if you use your other Operating Systems for nothing but casual games. Even Zuckerberg says his favorite thing to do on the Facebook Platform is to play Scrabulous with his grandparents.

Maybe it's that these aren't serious environments. Just to remind readers, though, there are a world of other apps on the web at large that offer remarkable utility in a really cool way. Remember Sarah Perez's review of Toluu last week? How about the first time you saw FriendFeed or Meebo? Those are strikingly useful apps and they are fun to use. In all our excitement about platforms, be it on Facebook or OpenSocial, too little attention has been paid to the fact that there's very, very little of substance coming from these development environments.

A representative of MySpace, of all places, assured us last week that the really good apps are coming soon. Is all of this technology democratizing publishing and content, so we get more than just lowest common denominator hyper-commercial crap - or is it just going to be more of the same trash that so dominates the culture industries the web claims to be challenging?

For the record, my favorite social networking app so far is Idiomag on Facebook. What's yours? We'd love to have a list here of ones that aren't dumb.

The Tech Is Going in the Wrong Direction

In that same phone call we also learned that already in these early days of OpenSocial it's taking hours to port from one container to another. Hours instead of weeks is good, but how long will true interoperability across multiple social networks take for developers once OpenSocial is widely deployed?

Most importantly, while developers are pumping out silly little apps and ad networks are throwing up ads on them - many of us are still waiting for cross-site app portability to be joined by true cross-site user data portability.

There are some brilliant people working at every stage in the OpenSocial process. Let's hope they can succeed in facilitating a meaningful user experience with the apps of the future.