Hi5's Alex St John

We've decided, we're a gaming platform – that's all we're going to do. We're not going to do anything else – we're going to be great at publishing and monetising games. That's nice – you can sleep well at night knowing you're not confused about your identity.

The second thing is, we've had a lot of experience with it, and one of the things you have to learn is to be good at partnering with developers. You see the sterile model is – here's some APIs, good luck to you and send us money. And join the sea over there.

The things that Hi5 is going to focus on, because this is how you really form good relationships and make companies really successful, is "you know what, we've got limited resources, I love all of you but only a few of you are actually talented and make good games so we're going to work with you". And we'll do a really good job of getting your games live on our site, promoting the heck out of them, making them really well integrated with the social experience, doing a good job of monetising and we'll share the revenue with you.

And that strategy is the the difference between say being a PC and being Nintendo. Nintendo says, we're going to be a really high quality gaming experience, we're not going to try to be a movie, video, music service, we're just going to do games. And we're going to do a great job of making premium content with the best, most talented companies out there. We'd like to open it up and support lots of developers and we've got programmes for supporting that, but fundamentally the emphasis is on the best, because really the success for both developer and consumer is when you're focusing on a high quality experience and everyone makes money or has a good experience.

We've announced a Facebook API – so we're cloning Facebook's APIs. So we can say to developers, don't take any risk, if you're already chasing Facebook that's great, there's going to be no technology barriers.

Second, we want to work with developers who want to launch a game but maybe don't have resources and the success that Zynga has, but they have talent and they're making good content. We'll say, come do a deal with us, we'll integrate your game on the site, promote it across the property, you can take it to Facebook and other places as well, but we want to do a great job of launching those titles on our platform. We know that when you establish a momentum and reputation, consumers will go, "yeah there's lots of crap games on Facebook, the good stuff and the newest stuff is over here." And it works well, all the messaging and the balance of the user experience is consistent and makes sense and it's not changing from day-to-day as Facebook has schizophrenia about how they're promoting things.

I think that over time, as you have clarity of vision, you can be a better destination for people who just want to play games with their friends. Here's a vehicle that does nothing but that extremely well, and the content's all very good. Of course, we can open up and say we'll support all the other sorts of content that's out there, but, to be clear, the best stuff is going to be most prominently featured.

This is not an easy problem to solve because obviously the games have a desire to market themselves, so what Facebook did was say we've got a real neat channel for text and for people to communicate, and we're going to open up an API and Zynga came along and said, "wow, games are really effective – people are really sociable, they're just poking each other for attention and recognition." And games are a great way to do that.

So Zynga says, "we're going to harness that to get a whole bunch of audience for free but getting all your friends to spam each other, because Facebook makes that easy." So some peoples walls fill with their 600 closest friends. The irony of this is Facebook's own attitude would be "we're a utility" and Facebook says, "but we're your real identity and we believe that all your information, personal data and social interaction should be largely public."

The only way to have good, relevant, contextual invitations to applications is to give people good privacy and anonymity controls so they can quality their own social graph. This is my mother and this is a stranger that gave me a business card at a show and wants to keep in touch and I don't share the same stuff with all of them.

No, not yet. Hi5 has the good, sort of first generation social media privacy and social media controls, but you can see what's interesting is the social sites have really grappled and the reason they grappled with privacy issues is what their business model has been. Their business model has revolved around a lot of public information for that inventory to be sold at the highest premium. The way you get away from that is to have a premium content offering and premium monetisation. When you do that you can say it's not so important to have everyone's information to be public because we have a better way of making money.

Once you've done that, you can give people the best tools ever for managing their relationships. There is a business problem with that, in my opinion, but there's also a user, technology problem. People don't really want to be managing and fiddling with privacy and controls. So you've got to find a really intelligent way of handling that to achieve what I call a well qualified social graph.

A well qualified social graph is one that natively understands relationships you have and natively understands what information is relevant to who so that you don't have to manually manage a lot. And designing something that does that is a challenge. I've got some ideas about it, but it's going to be an experimentation. I think you're going to see a lot of transition – Hi5's going to go from looking like a close cousin of other successful social networks, to having a really strong differentiating entertainment identity that is very different from MySpace or Facebook. There are things I don't want to announce, but we're taking it in the direction of being a premium gaming experience as opposed to a super people babbling to each other with primitive tools and poor privacy or user control.