You may have noticed that the localizations for some languages were quite outdated for a while. We're now at work updating all of the languages and adding several new ones! We're also implementing new features which help the community report errors or missing translations, which will give everyone a chance to contribute.

As part of this process, we're still looking for new translators. Please take a moment to check the requirements and apply for the job if you'd like to help taking XIHA to your native language!

Details are here: www.xihalife.com/translators/

Earning your way to free games just got a whole lot easier! XIHA has partnered with Offerpal Media to offer you a wide variety of fun ways to earn XIHA Coins. You can fill in surveys or try out different products and often the rewards are hundreds of coins!

We also offer another important new feature - you can buy new coins! So if you are missing a few coins and can't wait to buy a full game, you can quickly and easily buy just the coins you need and then use the coins to buy your new game.

The offers are customized for each country separately, so you will see a different list based on where you live. Check out www.xihalife.com/home/offerpal.php for the offers available to you!

Do you speak language other than English? Turn your native skills into cash, by applying a work at XIHA Life as a translator!

XIHA Life wants to help people around the world communicate and understand each other better, so we are accepting applications from speakers of all languages.

Please look at the translators-section for instructions on how to apply:

www.xihalife.com/translators/

XIHA Life Receives $1 Million in Seed Funding

Multicultural Social Network adds Jaiku Founder to the Board

Sunnyvale, CA – January 26, 2010 – XIHA Life (www.xihalife.com), the world's first truly multilingual and multicultural social network, announced today that it received $1 million in seed funding. Veraventure led the round, joined by international angel investors and the company founders.  XIHA Life also announced that Jyri Engeström, former Google Product Manager and co-founder of Jaiku, is coming on as a new member of the board, joining Jan Achrenius and chairman Ville Miettinen.

XIHA Life connects the people of the world through a multilingual, cross-cultural exchange. Simultaneous, real-time translation allows XIHA citizens to share travel tips, pictures, music, videos, games, knowledge and personal perspectives.  By transcending language barriers, XIHA allows users to make new friends from around the globe rather than merely reconnecting with high school acquaintances. Users can create blogs and homepages—or link to other social media—to share their personal experiences. XIHA community members live in over 200 countries, with no country accounting for more than five percent of total traffic. XIHA is based in Sunnyvale, California, Switzerland and Finland.

“New features like the unlimited HD video uploads and knowledge exchange have ratcheted up our organic growth to an astonishing rate, giving us over 700,000 members to date,” said Jani Penttinen, XIHA Life co-founder and CEO. “The new capital infusion will enable us to accelerate mobile platform enhancements and global outreach. We are also delighted to welcome new board member, Jyri Engeström, who brings invaluable Google-scale experience to the ongoing extensions of XIHA’s social infrastructure, including mobile phone support.”

This news was originally reported by TechCrunch:
XIHA Life secures $1m and adds Jaiku’s Engestrom to board (includes a video interview of Jyri talking about XIHA Life)

Also mentioned in ArcticStartup:
Jyri Engeström Joins Xiha Life’s Board While Xiha Closes A $1m Seed Round  

This is proving to be an exciting year at XIHA. This coming week we'll switch to our new game platform, which brings a lot of improvements to the old system with proper support for games in various languages, new payment methods, etc. In the coming weeks we have other announcements coming regarding exciting new features and partners!

We wish all of you a wonderful year of 2010! For many, the past year and even the past decade has been challenging, but it's important to never give up the hope! Difficult times make us stronger and hopefully bring out the best in us. We strongly believe 2010 will be a better year for everyone, so let's all head to the new year full of hope and good wishes!

XIHA Life has had some incredible growth during the year and we aim to continue on the same track, if even faster! We have a lot of important improvements coming your way during the next year.

Our new year's resolution is to make XIHA easier to use, and listen to you, our members, on how to make the community even better for everyone! Some things to come - expect to see XIHA on your mobile phone soon! Expect new applications to make for much richer user experience!

We're rolling out an all-new learning platform called XIHA Learning, powered by our partners BlueTeach! The system is currently in beta test and can be accessed by all XIHA members at www.xihalife.com/teach/. You'll need to enroll to XIHA Learning, and the new learning tool will appear in your profile.

XIHA Learning gives you a host of powerful tools for teaching and learning just about any skill online, be it new languages, math or even a game of poker! The learning suite has a video chat with an interactive white board where both the teacher and the student can draw and type text.

The best thing about XIHA Learning is that anyone can teach! It's free to use for everyone, and later on the qualified teachers will even be able to charge for their lessons. We're still fine-tuning so some features are missing. As always, please send any and all feedback to me (webmaster.xihalife.com).

Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek wrote an excellent article about XIHA Life this week titled "Social Networking for Global Citizens" (check it here: bit.ly/5IrqFf)

Today's Ilta-Sanomat in Finland features a four-page article about XIHA Life co-founder Jani Penttinen. The article is in the weekend "plus" part of the newspaper.

We have just started using new download servers for all XIHA-branded games. The downloads should work faster and more reliably than before, but we will keep the links to the old servers available as a backup anyway.

XIHA Life is a success story that has made the life happier for millions of people around the world. But how did it get started? XIHA Life co-founder Jani Penttinen shares the incredible details of the birth of XIHA at the SLUSH Helsinki 2009 event held at Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki, Finland on November 3.

SLUSH is an annual event for Finnish startups, both for those who have made it from the harsh Finnish weather - slush - and for those who dream of trying it out. Other speakers this year include Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Markets unit at Nokia and Jussi Pajunen, the mayor of Helsinki.

For more information, check out the SLUSH website at slushhelsinki.com/.

XIHA's travel service keeps getting better - we just added thousands of new hotels and an all new car rental service. We've partnered with a number of the largest car rental companies to provide a global network of car rentals. You can pretty much find a car no matter what your destination is!

XIHA Life had good representation at the MindTrek conference in Tampere, Finland. Co-founder Jani Penttinen was one of the speakers, talking about creating a multi-cultural social network.



Above: Mr. Penttinen being interviewed by TechPulse360.com during the MindTrek conference.

Wow. Time really flies when you're having fun. It seems as XIHA Ltd was just started, but it's actually approaching the two-year mark already!

The XIHA Life community has already existed for about three years, but it was in October 2007 when XIHA Ltd was formed to make sure the community gets the full support it deserves. XIHA's only function is to build and maintain XIHA Life.

Expect to see some celebrations next month. I can't give any details yet but I'm sure there will be some fun competitions and amazing special offers. Stay tuned!

XIHA and Foreca today announced a partnership which brings great benefits to anyone willing to make friends from around the world but has trouble starting up the conversation! You can now easily talk about the weather!

bit.ly/18lvnm

Ever wondered what to talk about when talking to someone you've never met before?This can be especially tricky in a multi-cultural community like XIHA Life, where the members come from different cultural backgrounds. We now have a perfect solution to you!

XIHA Life has just grown past 500 000 members! When you consider registering is optional - you can browse the site freely as a guest - this is quite a remarkable achievement! 

Many of your have been excited about our latest offering - daily XIHA Hour which brings you a hit game every day for extremely low price, mind-blowing offers to say the least.

This is very exciting - the long-awaited XIHA Chat Rooms are now available for Gold Members! You can now chat with friends from all over the world, no matter what language they speak!

Gold Members can join existing chat rooms, create new ones and have one-on-one chats with other members.

The XIHA Chat system is unique - we have real time translations (subtitles) in the chat so you can easily talk with speakers of other languages. You can have multiple chats open at the same time, and they stay open while you browse XIHA Life. In other words, you can keep checking new games or reading the forums while you are chatting!

Other cool new features are going to be announced soon... stay tuned!

I would like to welcome all Gold Members try out the new chat now! You can access the chat page by clicking on the "Chat" icon on the left side of the screen (the chat feature will later be available to everyone, but for now... if you want to access it, take the Gold Member Challenge!) 

As many of your already noticed, we have added a really cool forum search. You can now search through all of the forum topics in a fraction of a second! Just write what you're looking for to the search box and the results start appearing before you have even finished typing!

We are still improving the search and you will soon be able to target the search more accurately based on the category, languages, and so on. Oh and before you ask - blogs will have similar search in the coming days as well.

As always, please keep reporting the bugs you find - we'll keep fixing them as quickly as possible. Thanks everyone who has brought issues to our attention. With your help we keep making XIHA the best place to be on the entire internet!

Did you know XIHA has an excellent travel section? You didn't?! Click on the "Cities" tab at the top of the page to check it out!

As I'm writing this, we have 109,560 hotels in 23,005 cities in a total of 180 countries! More are being added all the time but this selection already is one of the largest in the world.

All hotel prices are guaranteed to be the lowest on the internet! If you find anything lower for the exact same hotel / room for the same date, let us know immediately (no later than 24 hours after the booking) and we will match the price.

With the worldwide selection like this, and unbeatable prices, can it get any better? Yes! Here's our special offer: When you book a hotel during July 2009 (for a stay any time during 2009), we will give you a free game!

How it works exactly is like this: 1. You'll find a hotel from our selection and book a room (make sure to login first). 2. Once you have stayed at the hotel, we will credit 1000 XIHA Coins to your account. 3. You can use the coins buy any game from the XIHA Games catalog of nearly 2000 great games!

Now you can combine your holiday travel with great games! Click here to begin: www.xihalife.com/cities/

We just updated the layout of the blog listing pages. If you're a member, the default view now shows blogs from your friends. If your friends don't have many blog updates, we'll also show the latest hot blogs. If you're a guest visitor we'll just show the latest hot blogs.

You may notice that there is no longer a way to list every single blog on the blog main page. This is mostly due to the fact that an open listing was attracting a lot of spammers who created dozens of new blogs every day just to stay in the listing page. All blogs are still being listed on your own pages, as well as your friends' activity logs.

If you want a wider audience, you will need to do some work to promote your blog... Also, we will soon add a blog search function with which you can easily find the types of blogs you want to read, and then start following those. What this means is that one way to get readers to your blog will be to simply write about something interesting and update it often!

Today we officially announced the new XIHA 2.0, which many of you have already beta-tested during the past few days. The new release comes with an all new easier to use layout, bunch of new features and a real-time search engine!

We have recently been running a little poll on the site and it appears by far the most of the users prefer the new look over the old one. Some of you had problems with the new layout and we're working hard to get everything fixed as soon as possible!

One of the notable changes you see when using the site is that you can now easily share content with friends to Facebook and Twitter with just a single mouse click. Also, most of the content can now be translated to your language by clicking a "translate" link next to the text.

The real-time search is very exciting! You can try it here: www.xihalife.com/friends/search.php ... you can type in what type of person you can looking for, where they live, what languages they speak, hobbies, etc., in any language and the search results start appearing as you type.

Check out today's press release here: bit.ly/19BIJv and please help us by spreading the word!

We're kicking off the summer season with a very special deal - each and every game from the Big Fish Games collection is now priced at 6.99 (euros or dollars depending on where you live)! This compares to the previous price point of 19.99!

Not only is the price point at an amazingly low level, we've also added new payment methods: you can now purchase all BFG titles using the same methods as our own XIHA Games titles: credit cards, bank transfer, PayPal, Moneybookers, mobile phone SMS payment (available in 20 countries, more to follow) and XIHA Coins! So for the first time ever you can now buy all of the hundreds of titles from the Big Fish Games collection without a credit card!

As a result of this, we are currently in the process of adding about 400 new games to XIHA Life! We used to feature only a small subset of BFG titles in the past due to differences in price point and payment methods, but now that everything is streamlined we're able to offer you all of those fantastic games.

For a full list of BFG titles see www.xihalife.com/bigfishgames/

This has been a long-awaited feature, but finally we're happy to announce privacy controls to XIHA Life users. You can now control who can view your profile and photos or read your blog. You can also choose who can contact you or comment your photos and blogs.

You can now connect your Twitter account with XIHA Life, and the tweets will flow automatically from Twitter to XIHA and back!

Connecting your Twitter to XIHA is a great idea for two reasons:

1. You will get much larger audience for your Tweets, outside of the "Twittersphere". You can keep Tweeting as usual, and all your updates will appear on XIHA Life as well. All updates on the XIHA pages have a link back to your Twitter account, so you can easily score more followers, too!

2. Your status updates on XIHA will appear on Twitter! In fact, you can use XIHA as a  Twitter client and send all your updates from your profile page (this is what our co-founder Jani Penttinen is doing).

You can find the Twitter connect from the left side panel of XIHA Life page when logged in to your account.

More great features to be announced soon!

If you don't know what Twitter is, see below for a quick explanation from Geek And Poke
 

RED HERRING REVEALS COMPANIES SELECTED AS WINNERS FOR THE RED HERRING 100 EUROPE 2009

Berlin, April 3rd, 2009 – Red Herring today announced that XIHA Life was named a WINNER of the Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.

“During a difficult year, Red Herring still received an impressive list of submissions from companies across the EMEA region, clearly demonstrating Europe’s role as a major center of innovation in the global technology sector,” said Red Herring Managing Director, Farley Duvall. “The exceptional accomplishments of European technology startups and entrepreneurs are a testament to the rapid advancements being made in building the European innovation ecosystem.”

Red Herring’s lists of top private companies are an important part of the publication’s tradition of identifying new and innovative technology companies and entrepreneurs. Companies like Google, eBay, and Skype were spotted in their early days by Red Herring editors, and touted as leaders that would change the way we live and work.

"Everyone at XIHA is excited to be selected as one of the most promising new companies in Europe by Red Herring's expert jury" commented Jani Penttinen, XIHA's CTO and one of founders. "XIHA has had a fantastic year and since our public launch 12 month ago we've grown to more than 1.5 million monthly visitors, coming from all over the world. As our rapid growth continues, we feel confident that we are one of the companies who are able to ride through the economic storm. It's an interesting year ahead with a lot of new features to be announced!"

Red Herring’s editorial staff rigorously evaluated several hundred private companies through a careful analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development. 

Red Herring has honored the Red Herring 100 Europe Finalist companies at its Red Herring Europe 2009 Conference, which was held March 31- April 2, at the Berlin Radisson Hotel. This intimate, 2 1/2 day event will explore how European firms are leading the charge in many technology sectors, gaining a competitive advantage, and driving entrepreneurial success in ways that create business opportunities for challengers and incumbents alike. 


About Red Herring
Red Herring is a global media company which unites the world’s best high technology innovators, venture investors and business decision makers in a variety of forums: a leading innovation magazine, an online daily technology news service, technology newsletters and major events for technology leaders around the globe.  Red Herring provides an insider’s access to the global innovation economy, featuring unparalleled insights on the emerging technologies driving the economy. More information about Red Herring is available on the Internet at www.redherring.com.

The full list of winners: www.herringevents.com/europe09/redherring100.html

Great news - XIHA Life was announced a winner in Red Herring 100 Europe 2009!

The awards ceremony was held in Berlin on April 2nd. More details and photos to be posted later.

BERLIN / RED HERRING -CONFERENCE, APRIL 1st 2009

XIHA Life proudly announced today in Red Herring -conference that it has acquired the world's smallest nation, the republic of Nauru. XIHA Life received recently an investment from a Chinese investor and the deal was financed with those assets. Jani Penttinen, the founder of the site, comments: "XIHA Life is a unique multicultural and multilingual site which grows at very rapid phase. This deal suits very well in our strategy for aggressive expanding and it also offers us unique revenue possibilities like taxation." The island will face lot of changes in the future as the new government will be selected not by an election but by an arcade gaming tournament. The tournament model has been considered more democratic than an election model is. Gold members of XIHA Life will be rewarded by an unique opportunity to apply for citizenship in the new country.

XIHA Life's phenomenal growth has received a lot of media attention lately. Recently one of XIHA Life founders, Jani Penttinen was an invited guest in popular Finnish prime time talk show hosted by Arto Nyberg. The guests of the talk show are usually athletes, politicians or artists, so an appearance as an entrepreneur is quite an achievement in itself. The interview is here in two parts. The interview below is in Finnish language, with English subtitles.

Kauppalehti, Finland's leading business publication has a really good article on XIHA Life, with an interview of one of the founders Jani Penttinen.
Unfortunately we cannot reproduce the text here, but the article is very positive indeed. It's great to see XIHA's success in the difficult economic times is being noticed! The newspaper can also be purchased in pdf format from their website www.kauppalehti.fi/ (publication date 2009-03-03, pages 14 and 15).

We've added an easy and convenient new way to purchase games from the XIHA Games catalog - you can use your mobile phone to pay! This new payment system works with all mobile phones which can send and receive SMS text messages, which is practically all phones in use today.

The payment system is very easy to use, and absolutely secure. You don't need to type in credit card or banking information. You just need to reply to an SMS message to confirm you want to place an order. Since an SMS can only be sent from your phone, there is no risk because nobody else can place orders for your phone even if they find out your phone number.

Initially the new mobile payment system works in the following 15 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, UK and the USA. We expect to be adding more countries very soon, almost on weekly basis.

Mobile payments are currently available for all games that cost 10 euros / dollars or less, which covers most of the games we offer.

To use the mobile payments, choose any game from the games list and locate a mobile payment button on the right side panel. There are step-by-step instructions to guide you through the process. Your first purchase will require a little more work as you need to enter a phone number, but in the subsequent times all you need to do is click the mobile payment button!

One of the best features is that this payment method is instant - once you've replied to the SMS message you receive, to confirm the payment, you will receive the game activation code immediately. You'll get playing in just a minute from the moment you've decided which game you wish to purchase!

We have added a long overdue feature where all users can rate comments by others. It's very simple - when you see thumbs up and down symbols next to a message in blogs, forums or game pages (soon in home pages too), just click on one of the symbols to state your opinion. Comments with negative score will be hidden over time, and those members who consistently leave low rated comments will lose their commenting privileges.

This system is aimed at improving the user experience, and make XIHA Life a nicer place for everyone. When you write comments that other members rate high, your personal rating will also improve and if you reach high enough levels you may start earning more bonus coins for the things you do. And when you rate comments by other members, you are helping good quality content stand out.

As a general guideline: for the most part you don't need to go anything. If you see something really bad (such as spamming), give thumbs down. If you see something you really like, give thumbs up. For the most part you can just keep using the site as usual!

Another new feature today is available for XIHA Gold Members only. You can now correct the language settings of any message on the forum. If you see a message written in French, but it says "English" as the language, just click on the language name and choose the correct one.

This feature is available for anyone for their own messages, while Gold Members can set the language of any message (abusing this feature will result in permanent removal of Gold Member privileges, but obviously our Gold Members are smart folks who would never do anything like that!)

Note that currently you can only select one of the languages the author of the comment has selected, or the language of the topic. This limitation is to make it easier to choose the correct language: we don't want to browse through all of the over 50 languages XIHA already supports!

This is the beginning of new era in computer gaming! We're excited to announce that almost the entire games catalog (more than 1000 games!) now sells for less than $10 per game and hundreds of titles have been priced as low as $6.99. In other words - ALL prices have been slashed to half, often even more!

The best thing is - we still have all the best games available! It's the same great games, for much less money. We realize a lot of you out there are concerned of the gloomy economy worldwide. This new pricing strategy should ensure that there's at least one thing you don't need to cut back on!

For EU residents only: If you pay by invoice, the price for nearly all games in EUR is between €6.99 and €9.99 including value added tax.

The game price in coins and the coin rewards have not changed. All games still cost 1000 coins, and each purchase is rewarded with 200 coins. The pricing in EUR and the coin awards may change at any point in the future, as we are analyzing the effects of the new pricing.

I'd like to remind everyone that inviting your friends to XIHA is a great idea! Not only will your friends absolutely love you for introducing such a great place, but you will also earn coins for referral, as well as for every time your friends buy games, so by inviting enough friends you might just earn one or two free games...

*This change applies to all games sold under the XIHA brand. We have a few games affiliated from Big Fish Games, and the pricing on those is not affected.

Unfortunately we had to stop giving coins for downloading the free trial versions of games. It was a nice little extra reward for people, just 1 coin for every download. Normal users don't download hundreds of games in a day, but some people figured out that they could download all of the games in one day and earn enough coins to purchase a game. Then they would open a new account and attempt the same thing again. While we can easily spot it and close such accounts, this started to be an extra burden.

We in fact need to pay for the bandwidth so this type of members we in fact stealing from the others. Normally it's totally fine, as we know that a certain percentage of downloads result in a purchase so we want to encourage everyone to try the games. The more games are played, the more chances there are that someone finds a game that they absolutely want. But when someone downloads 1000 games a day, you kind of know that they're not playing or even installing those...

We hope to continue the download rewards at a later time, with some type of a limitation. Probably it will be a Gold Member -only feature. It would be easy thing to limit the maximum rewards to certain number of downloads per day, but we'd also need to do some sort of a display for the counters so the members don't need to wonder why downloads are sometimes rewarded and sometimes not. To keep the site as easy and simple to use as possible, we opted to remove the download rewards for the time being.

Awarding of bonus coins for game reviews was suspended for a while as we upgraded systems. This process has now been completed and coins are awarded for all game reviews, comments and tips. We also retro-actively awarded coins for all reviews posted during the time the awards system was suspended.

There's been some new exciting game releases over the holidays so let's get playing and keep those reviews coming! They're very helpful to other members (Keep in mind that in order to earn coins, there's a limitation that very short reviews, such as just a smiley or "good" will not be enough. Couple sentences will be fine though, so we're not asking you to write a book or anything...

As previously reported by Taneli Tikka and Arctic Startup, XIHA Life has received major funding from a Chinese investor who for the time being prefers to stay incognito. This is a significant step for us, as XIHA Life keeps growing fast all around the world.

XIHA has already reached the point of being profitable, so we will be able to spend all of the funding in growth. We are in the process of setting up our US office in Sunnyvale, CA and our headquarters will move from Finland to a new office in Zürich, Switzerland. Most of the development will still remain in Finland and in fact we will be hiring more developers for all of our locations during all of 2009!

We are currently working on a number of exciting new features, so expect to hear some great news from us in the near future!

At this point we are looking for executives - we have openings for CTO, COO and CEO at the Finland can California locations. More details will be posted soon...

Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest newspaper reaching over 1 million readers, wrote a great article about XIHA Life on they Sunday issue. The article covered the history of XIHA Life starting from how the founders met each other and running all the way to the amazing growth and popularity the site is enjoying today!

Effective immediatelly, we will no longer give bonus coins for messages that are extremely short (such as "Nice!") or messages that contain only smileys or images with no text at all. Posting such comments is fine - there's just no coins given.

Unfortunately there has lately been too much spam caused by a handful of members who have tried to earn games by posting a ton of meaningless comments on the forum. This means that one person is trying to earn a game by cheating, and thousands of other people have to suffer. We don't want to encourage any behavior which makes the forum less usable, so from now on we only reward bonus coins for messages that contain some meaningful content.


I would like to remind everyone that spamming is absolutely not acceptable. Nobody - I repeat - nobody has ever received a game by posting spam. The spammers just have their account closed immediately and all coins are forfeited. There is no reason to try it.

On a positive note - a lot of people have received their free games for posting interesting stories and by participating in lively discussions!

We have a fantastic new feature to share with all of you! You no longer need to rotate or crop photos before uploading them to XIHA Life. In fact, you don't even need to worry about colors being washed out or too dark / bright /etc... XIHA now has a very powerful photo editing tool called Picnik, which lets you do just about everything you ever need to do with photos, all in your browser from within XIHA Life!

To edit the photos, just click on any of your photos, and right below the photo click "Photo editor" link. The first time you run the editor, it takes a while to load but will be faster the next time. At this point the photo editor is available in English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.


You'll have a variety of options: You can rotate, crop and scale the photo. You can also edit the colors and exposure, adjust the sharpness and even remove red eyes! When finished, click "Save to XIHA Life" and your changes will be applied to your XIHA Life photo album. Don't worry if you later change your mind - you can always revert the changes and return back to the original!


Rotating the image has some useful uses. First, of course, it lets you correct the orientation, if the photo needs to be rorated 90 degrees as often is the case. Second, it lets you do minor adjustments if you just want to make sure the horizon is level. And of course, you can do wild effects to make boring photos much more interesting!


The colors too flat? Faded out? Too bright? Dark? No worries! You can boost the contrast, add light or saturation and give the photos a whole new life.


Cropping photos can also be very useful. Want a face photo but don't have a shot of yourself only? Upload a photo with you and your friends together and crop it to show your face only!

XIHA Life just keeps getting better! We just added a new very exciting tool to the forum - quick translate option! Whenever you encounter a message on the forum you cannot understand, just click "translate" next to the message title, and the text is automatically translated to your own language. It's very easy, and convenient.

We will be adding the quick translate option everywhere in XIHA Life, from user messages to photo descriptions and everything in between. Please try it out on the forum now, and let us know how it works. As always; all feedback is very much appreciated!

We just updated the layout of the blog listing pages. If you're a member, the default view now shows blogs from your friends. If your friends don't have many blog updates, we'll also show the latest hot blogs. If you're a guest visitor we'll just show the latest hot blogs.

You may notice that there is no longer a way to list every single blog on the blog main page. This is mostly due to the fact that an open listing was attracting a lot of spammers who created dozens of new blogs every day just to stay in the listing page. All blogs are still being listed on your own pages, as well as your friends' activity logs.

If you want a wider audience, you will need to do some work to promote your blog... Also, we will soon add a blog search function with which you can easily find the types of blogs you want to read, and then start following those. What this means is that one way to get readers to your blog will be to simply write about something interesting and update it often!

Up until now the Google translator has done a literal translation of XIHA Life's name when translating between English and Chinese (both directions), resulting in quite funny text. In a sign that we're becoming a major brand, Google has learned to translate the brand correctly!

嘻哈生活 from Chinese to English gives "XIHA Life" as a result. Even the capitalization is spot on!

"XIHA Life" gives 嘻哈生活 as a result, which is even more amazing. The words XI and HA in pinyin both have a number of possible Chinese characters, and Life can be expressed in many ways (living, etc.) as the Chinese grammar is totally different from English. So, for an automatic translation system there is no way to know XIHA Life should be translated as 嘻哈生活 unless you decide XIHA is a brand rather than an arbitrary set of words!

This is an important improvement in Google translations, as now the reader of a translated text will know that the text refers to XIHA Life, the community, rather just a random words which don't seem to fit the context (the way it usually goes).

I guess it should be noted that such brands as Facebook and Myspace don't seem to be getting similar treatment.

See it for yourself:

www.google.com/translate_t?sl=...BB%E5%93%88%E7%94%9F%E6%B4%BB  (If you want to see how not to do it, check out the same in Yahoo's Babelfish)

Today's been a day when everyone talks about XIHA Life! There been a number of blog posts and a whole lot of Twittering going on. Here's a few of the blog posts we've noticed so far (if you know of any other posts, please let us know and we'll include it here)



Mashable: mashable.com/2008/08/26/xiha-public-launch/

Profy: profy.com/2008/08/26/xiha-life...-for-music-bands-with-myspace/

TechCrunch: www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/26/...al-network-for-multilinguists/

Rotor Blog: www.rotorblog.com/2008/08/26/x...t-multilingual-social-network/

Sociable Blog: www.sociableblog.com/2008/08/2...network-xiha-life-open-to-all/

Feed My App Blog: www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/social-n...lications-sites-xiha+life/5733

It's nice to see how much excitement our multilingual approach is causing, and it obviously feel great to see that our new music section is getting to a great start!

Edit: Adding the great Finnish startup blog Arctic Startup: www.arcticstartup.com/2008/08/27/xiha-life-gets-a-double-peak/

We've added a new easy way to decorate your profile. You can now pick from a set of templates which control the background picture and button styles. We'll be adding more choices soon, but this will get your started!

As before, you are still able to edit the CSS and upload your own background picture. You can even edit the CSS of the templates so you can use them as a starting point and make your changes if you wish.

Go to your profile page, there's a big "Edit" button on the left panel. You can't miss it!

XIHA Music is now available to everyone. We are rolling more music features out in the coming days, while testing the systems and making sure everything works. Please report all oddities and bugs!

Currently you can browse the music selection in the music page (www.xihalife.com/music/ ... we are still in test phase so the music selection is very limited) and you can add any songs you like to your playlist, which is available on your profile page. You can also become fans of the bands you like.

Very soon you will also be able to create separate playlists for blogs, rate bands and songs, and have more control over the music player.

We are also finally opening the registration for bands. The rules are: you must own the rights to your music. This means that even if you register as a band, you are absolutely not allowed to upload music from anyone else than your own band!

For bands, XIHA Music offers a chance to reach world wide audience. We have visitors from all countries of the world, speaking dozens of languages, from all culture backgrounds. Your music has never had an audience this global!

We continue our effort to localize XIHA Life and recently we've added Arabic, Esperanto, Greek, Thai and Ukrainian to the selection. Now we have a total of 30 languages in the user interface!

We have also expanded the selection of user languages to 48. These are languages the users can choose to speak, and they can be used on the site when writing content. These are also the next in line for localization. We believe to be the most localized and the most global of all the major social networks. This is just the start though, as our goal is to reach most of the world's population in their native languages.

We welcome suggestions on new languages, and of course we also welcome volunteers who are native speakers of minority language groups and wish to help in translation efforts!

We've just launched a new premium membership program called XIHA Gold Member! This exciting program is targeted to people who are serious about our community. It's free to be a Gold Member, but you first need to pass a test to qualify. If interested, you can take the test here: www.xihalife.com/gold/

Gold Members will have various benefits and privileges. They will have a lot more control over XIHA, with abilities to participate in organizing content and translating XIHA to their native languages. The will also be special offers for Gold Members, and obviously a lot of other cool features will be added over time!

We've very excited to add Hungarian and Hebrew to the ever-increasing number of languages XIHA Life is localized into! Special thanks to go Anna for the Hungarian translation and Tiina for the Hebrew. We still have a little bit of work left with the Hebrew version to fully support the right-to-left reading direction but the navigation is fully functional.

To counter the recent increase in attempted spamming, we've introduced a new simple rule to messages: you can't include email address in a message if the recipient is not your friend. Makes sense, right? If you don't know the person, don't get directly into personal details. The reason we're doing this is because what spammers and scammers do, is they try to get you to contact them directly outside of XIHA Life - using email.

Here's a piece of advice to everyone: if a stranger approaches you and asks you to get in touch via email - don't do it. Often these messages give the impression the sender is an attractive girl looking for true love, and sometimes they hint about chances of getting rich. But let's face it - if you don't know the sender, the sender doesn't know you either.

So if she talks about love (or money) without knowing you, chances are it's not real! First get to know people in the safety of XIHA Life, and only share your email address with someone if you end up developing a closer relationship and learn to trust the person. So from now on the attempts to share an email address with strangers will automatically be marked spam!

We updated the bonus system today with the introduction of XIHA Coins! The old points system ceases to exist, with all the points converted to XIHA Coins at a ratio of 100 points = 1 coin.

The purchasing power of the coins stays the same as with the old points - if you had exactly enough points to buy a game, you will now have exactly the required number of coins!

We greatly enhanced the bonus rates! Most of the things you do at XIHA Life is now collecting you XIHA Coins much faster than before. For example, inviting friends now gives you 5 times bigger bonus than before!


The XIHA Coins are displayed as coin symbols on the left side panel.

We've been busy with new features lately! The language selection has now been enhanced such that you can choose not only the user interface language, but any number of content languages, even when you're not signed in. The multilingual aspect is unique to XIHA Life and we wanted to give visitors a better chance to try it out.

The new language selector adds something for the members too, as you can now set languages on and off any time with on need to visit the profile. This is convenient if you sometimes want to focus on a single language, or if you want to check out a new language but don't want to add it to your profile. Just click on the globe in the top right cornet of every page!

Another new feature which may not be very obvious, is that we are now automatically detecting the language in which comments are posted on blogs and user home pages. Using the language detection we have a lot more control on which messages to show you; we will only show you public messages we think you can understand! The language detection doesn't affect private messages.

We will be expanding the use of language detection to other areas of XIHA Life to make it easier and more convenient to post content in multiple languages.

Finally, we've added a new "quick search" for local friends. On the main page there's now a display of a few people living in the area where you currently are, speaking the languages you speak. By a single click you will see more search results and have an option to refine the search options. This makes it very easy and convenient to connect to people even if you are new to the area.

We continue to add new languages to XIHA Life. The user interface is now fully localized to 23 languages and content can be generated in 31 languages! And we're just getting started...

The "facelift" of XIHA Life is almost finished and today we reached an important milestone by launching the new logo. The logo utilizes colors from two of our main categories, "living" and "games". It also features a pair of palm trees symbolizing our quest for the "Good Life!"

XIHA Life keeps getting more and more international. With the addition of Korean (kr.xihalife.com), Hindi (hi.xihalife.com) and Vietnamese (vi.xihalife.com) we now have the user interface translated to 19 languages! Coming soon will be Japanese and Polish, with even more to follow in the coming months.

While it's very nice to have the website translated to even more languages, the coolest part of XIHA still remains the truly multi-lingual system - once you sign up you can choose multiple languages and will get a simultaneous access to content and people written in all of those!

We'd like to say thanks to everyone who has sent feedback on our new design. One of the first comments we received was that the design is more clear and organized, but it lacks color! Well, we listen to our members and so the design has been modified a little bit to make it more colorful. What do you think?

The new design is now available on the main page, games, blogs and the user home pages. None of it is fully finalized yet as this is a work in progress - this means any and all comments are welcome! We are creating this site for you!

Exciting news! We've started rolling out the new design for XIHA Life... currently only the main page is using the new layout but over the next couple weeks we will gradually extend the design to cover the entire site. Please report any problems by sending a message to me (webmaster.xihalife.com) and obviously let us know how you feel about the new look!

We have just updated XIHA Life servers so the site is now running on brand new, much more powerful hardware. We had short scheduled maintenance breaks today and last Friday to prepare for the upgrade and now we're happy to tell you that the work has been completed! While this means we can now handle a lot more users without compromising performance, it also means something may be broken. We will fix things as they show up, though as of this moment things appear normal.

Next up in the exciting updates is the brand new look! In the coming days we will start gradually doing a "face lift", which should be completed by the end of the month. We've worked together with a top web design company to come up with a new design that is easier to use and looks great! Hold on tight...

XIHA has a new exciting feature - activity logs. We've had your personal activity log on your own space for a while now, which shows what you have done and what other members have done in relation to your property... commented on your blogs, replied to your topics, joined on your referral... and so on.

Now the feature has been enhanced with two new selections - the activity of your friends and selected activity on the entire website. This way you will immediately know when you friends update their blogs or post on the forum. Best of all, your friends will also see what you are up to! All you need to do is write something or upload photos and your friends will know about it.

This also means it really makes sense to build up those friend networks! The more friends you have, the bigger your audience. To make things even more exciting we're giving a special bonus until the end of the year: you'll get bonus points for all the points achieved by the members you invite (including those you have invited in the past!) More about this promotion right here: www.xihalife.com/bbs/home/xihalife/6058.htm

As many of you have already noticed, we've made some improvements to the member homes (that's the page you get to when you click on you own face photo, for example!) The improvements are not stopping here, it's an on-going process and part of our overall design / face lift. Here's a summary of what has happened so far:

- Large face photos. The face photos are now stored in the photo album and can be as large as you want. At this point we display a 200 pixels wide version on the home page but there will be more freedom for that soon. The shape is also free now, so the face doesn't need to be square anymore (though it will still be displayed as square in many places).

- New layout. The home page layout is now in three columns - left has some quick links, middle is a wide column where you can find comments, blogs, forum, etc. and the right side has some info about you and your friends. More of there "applications" will be added soon to help you make your space even more your own.

- XIHA logo banner removed from the member homes. We felt having a big graphical banner at the top of the page made it harder for people to design their pages so we decided to remove it.

- Status box... this is a cool little way to tell everyone what you're doing and how you're feeling right at the moment.

- History log... this box in the middle column on your space tells what has happened in your XIHA world lately. It tells what you have done, comments made on your blogs or forum topics, friends joined, etc.

Coming up soon... you will be able to move the "applications", the boxes with information, around your home. The history log will give you a view on your friends lives too so you will immediately know when any of your friends posts something new. You will be able to choose what to show, who can see it, and how they are laid out! The same will apply to your photos and blogs - you will soon have a full control on who can read your blog, view your blog and visit your XIHA home.

We welcome all feedback on the changes, and encourage you give ideas and suggestions on how you would like to improve XIHA Life! Stay tuned... lots of exciting stuff happening in XIHA world!

We made a big change to the face photos. Earlier the face photos were limited to 100x100 pixel square but now the old face photo system has been completely removed and the face photos are just like any other photos in your album! This gives a lot more freedom - the size is no longer limited to square and you can easily change the face photos without having to upload. Just go to your photo album, click edit on any photo and check the box that says "Face photo".

We still obviously use the square-cut version of the face photos in places like the forum where the layout requires somewhat predictable sizes. The real shape and the larger size is visible in your own space and will later be shown in the member listing.

In the past few days we finally rolled out our eagerly awaited newsletters. In the first phase we're sending out weekly notifications of new game releases to those members who have expressed interest in games. Currently the posting are made only in English and Finnish, more languages to be added soon.

The emails include the latest game releases but also a cool new feature - personalized recommendations. Based on the games you've played in the past we're creating a list of games you didn't try yet but which might be of interest to you. With more than 1000 games in our catalog it can be a lot of work to find what you like so this should be a great help!

If you haven't received the newsletter, go to your "My info" and check the account info settings (www.xihalife.com/home/accountinfo.php) to make sure your email is valid and that you have selected the "new games" newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time so we suggest you try it out! If you have subscribed but still didn't receive it, check your spam folder. The best bet is to add support@xihalife.com to your email reader's address book.

We've been working to get XIHA Life on new languages and I'm happy to report that the progress is excellent! Once the latest translations are completed this site is available in 13 languages! And unlike many other sites who build separate websites for each language, our unique multi-cultural approach puts everyone in the same space. Basically, you can switch the user interface language at any time by clicking a flag at the bottom of the page.

The content you see is determined in your settings, so you might use Swedish as your user interface language, but if you can also speak French and English you will still see all messages and blogs written in all of those languages.

Here's the current language selection: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish, Portugese, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, Tagalog, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese

Some of the translations are not yet completed, so some of the text may be displayed in English.

If you find any "bugs" in the text or feel something could be said in a different way to make better sense, please let us know!

Also, if you would like to help out on translations to these or any other language, get in touch! We're eager to see XIHA Life in your language! Our translation process has been tuned to be very easy with our own in-house built tools, so it's fun and rewarding... just think of all the people who get to enjoy their favorite website in their own language!

Special thanks go to Cami, memoryrose, micah anne, Sebastien, brasilandesa, meyerink, dima and Ricky who've been helping us make this site a much nicer place to visit for a lot of people!

We've done some changes which should greatly improve the performance of this site. We know last week the site was quite painfully slow but things should be much better now! The source of the problem has been identified and fixed, and we're working to make sure it won't happen again.

The slowness of the site was mostly due to certain search engine bots finding their way to a few very large, unoptimized (and unpublished) sections of the site and then pounding them pretty hard and frequently over a course of several days. Live and learn! We need to be sure to keep stuff out of the live server when it's not meant to be accessed and only make it available when it's ready for the light of the day... in any case the problem should be solved now and the site back to its regular speed...

We often see people wondering whether it's ok to post a link pointing to another website on our forums or blogs. Some have posted links, some have just mentioned the site's name while others have just wondered out loud.

Here's the official word: Yes, you can post links.

After all, sharing links is fun! If you see something fun, go ahead and tell the others. If you're writing an article about a subject and used other websites as a reference, it's pretty reasonable to name your sources.

We've made it easy to include links in your blogs and forum posts: just write the web address. This is automatically converted into a link, so there's nothing else you need to do. If you wish to control the text of the link (instead of showing the url), you can use the [url] tags, which may or may not be familiar to you from some other sites. Here's how to use them:

If you type: [url=http://www.xihalife.com]XIHA Life[/url], you will get: XIHA Life

But like I said, if you just want to include a web address, you can type www.xihalife.com and it is automatically converted into a clickable link. Nice and easy! We're later going to feature a "My links" section on everyone's home page which will list all the links you posted... not much info to share about that just yet, other than that it will be completely automated so you don't need to worry about it...

Hey, guess what - here's some small print! If you're like most of us who just likes to relax and enjoy visiting a friendly website community... you can't skip the next. We just need to say it:



Small print: We won't accept links to sites that are not suitable for teens, promote violence or otherwise are of extremely bad taste. We also won't accept links that are purely for promotional purposes. Any such links will be removed so you'd be wasting your time posting them in the first place. Please note that all links pointing to domains other than xihalife.com are automatically equipped with nofollow.

Welcome to the XIHA Life blog! I am the XIHA Life webmaster and I'll be using this blog to keep you up to date on changes and improvements to the site. Please feel free to post comments and questions, suggestions or anything you'd like! I'm here to help!



-- Webmaster, XIHA Life