As often happens in the valley, people switch jobs. Speaking from experience, people around here have a certain sense of innovation ADD. After you stay at a job for a while, there’s just a depreciating return in experience for every additional month you continue. So, it’s no great surprise that one of the valley’s Jet setters, Adriana Gascoigne, has moved into a new position. Adriana has switched Ogilvy to my favorite part of the internet right now, social networking. She’s joining up with one of the largest stealth social networks, Hi5, and has a whole going away post about it today.
I say stealth because the tremendous growth of the site has gone largely unnoticed by valley reporters. As Adriana describes, Hi5 is “1.) World’s fastest growing social network among the top-10 global social networks 2.) Based on the June comScore Media Metrix worldwide figures released in June, hi5 grew 79% in the first half of 2008 3.) hi5’s monthly unique visitors increased from 31.4 million in December 2007 to 56.4 million in June 2008″.
She also goes on to say the site has some exciting new product set to launch. I’ll be interested to see what they come up with. For me the next two years will be marked by the “digestion” of social networking by the web at large. We’ll see the incorporation of social features into new websites through technologies like “Facebook Connect” and a new traffic generating paradigm will emerge, discovery. Natrually I also have a great deal of faith in how advertising will fit into that equation, but that’s for me to but Adriana about later. 
