We just wrote about Xiha closing a $1m seed round as well as adding Jyri Engeström (Ex-Jaiku/Google) to their board. If that’s not enough now the multilingual, cross-cultural social network comes out with its own developer program. A developer program is nothing revolutionary in itself, but shows that Xiha aims to innovate right on the heels of the fatter cats like Facebook by giving developers access to their APIs and facilitating embedding new products into XIHA Life.
XIHA developers will receive premium support, including customizing API calls to their needs and help with the integration to maximize the success of their app. Once the integration has been finished, XIHA promises to actively promote the new applications.
XIHA futher tells us that it should be much easier to get noticed than it is on a giant social networking site such as Facebook: “With XIHA it is possible to reach an audience 10-100 times larger with minimal effort. XIHA will not require app exclusivity, and will allow for deep integration of the app into the social networking site.” That’s good news as is the fact that XIHA has taken its time to learn from the mistakes Facebook made by letting all kinds of app-pollution to get approved ranging from Super Pokes to small sheeps.
They clearly have given the issue a thought as Jani Penttinen, CEO and co-founder of XIHA Life, tells us that “We will be selecting only innovative, high quality apps that will add value to the community, to put forth our full network support behind these applications.” Having said that, you could argue Apple is rather strict with their app approval as well, but we have still ended up with a Store full of crap from which it is extremely hard to get your app to stand out if you’re not already a service with a significant user base elsewhere in the Internet.
Expect a flood of language related apps. Currently XIHA attracts 700,000 members who come from over 200 countries, with no country accounting for more than five percent of total traffic.
