What does "xiha" mean?

Xiha is Chinese and can be freely translated as "happy" or "happiness". It comes from words "xixi" and "haha" which are sounds of laughter.

The Mandarin Chinese way to write "xiha" is 嘻哈. Coincidentally the Cantonese pronunciation of these same characters is "hiha", which means hip-hop.

How many languages do you support?

The user interface has been localized to 40 languages, with many more being under way. We expect to have more than 50 languages by the end of 2008.

What do you mean by "first truly multilingual" ?

When we talk about XIHA Life, a question that often comes up is "Doesn't [xyz] also do multiple languages?" (xyz being any of the other major social networks) Well, they all support multiple languages, but in a monolingual fashion. XIHA is still the only one actually multilingual. All of the other social networks force you to choose one language, out of the many. If you speak multiple languages, there's no way to express that. And there's no way to view content in selected languages, nor is there a way to search for people based on your language preferences.

Do you translate the text I write?

No, we don't translate. There are good services already available for automatic translation. Instead, we detect the language of all the content produced by our members and the apply a filter so that each visitor only sees the content they can understand. We have applied the multilingual support for all the services we provide, and we in essence act as facilitators of multilingual and multi-cultural communication between people around the world. Instead of translating what you write, we help you find the people in other countries who you are actually able to communicate with.

Where are the XIHA users coming from?

Our users from from all over the world, from over 200 countries. The top countries currently are China, Brazil, Turkey, USA, France and Spain but even the biggest countries only account for about 5% of the total traffic. Interestingly, the traffic is also very evenly spread across the continents, such that the Americas, Europe and Asia each represent for about 30% of the total traffic.