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!

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 listi