Hi5 and Widgetbox have teamed up and hi5 now has access to Widgetbox’s App Gallery to get an integrated solution which will allow applications built on Widgetbox to come out as the standalone applications as part of the hi5 network itself. This is a welcome change considering that even after having support for Widgetbox widgets, developers were not fully able to influence hi5 as a widget related network, mainly owing to the limited capabilities of the widgets.

Hi5 has stated that over 2 million Widgetbox widgets have been included in hi5, stirring up around 65,000 subscriptions to widgets. Developers can now distribute through Widgetbox, the OpenSocial applications that they have made and get it to hi5 or any other network that has support for OpenSocial.

This is beneficial to both Widgetbox and Hi5. Hi5 can give more value to the developer community, whereas Widgetbox will provide extended channels to access its Application Gallery creations. It will also be beneficial to Widgetbox’s developers and advertisers alike.

Hi5 has been one of the first in supporting OpenSocial and took a step further with its messaging API so there are quite a few ways, which are hi5 specific, for developers to adopt their applications further.