Hevre (חבר'ה)

» see hevre.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Shlomi Unger and Shlomo Waldman started Hevre in 2001 with an idea they took directly from Classmates.com: the internet is good at finding people you have lost, so build the index around the institutions that sort a life into cohorts. The software house Pixysoft built it. Within a year ynet had it on the list of the five most popular sites in Israel, and by April 2002 more than 180,000 people had signed up. It is generally described as the first Israeli social network, and the timing supports it.

The category list is what made it local. You joined groups by elementary school, by high school, by university, by workplace, by youth movement, by the communities Israelis had left abroad. And by army unit, filtered by discharge year. More than fifteen thousand groups existed on the site. In a conscript country that last category does most of the work, because everybody has a cohort they were assigned to rather than chose, and twenty years later they cannot remember anybody's surname. Turkey has conscription too, so I can see exactly why that index would hold. I have never had a Hebrew-language account and this whole grave is read off other people's reporting.

In August 2002 it added a voicemail service with Partner Communications so members could leave each other messages by phone. That same month TheMarker reported that MSN Israel was looking at buying it. In 2003 the group spun off two dating sites, Hevre Date for the secular audience and Dati-Date for the religious one, plus Hamula, a family tree site for large families. A photo product called Pik followed in 2004 with Agfa behind the printing, and by 2005 the group had bought the free-forum site Hyde Park and started talking to Lycos Europe about building the same thing outside Israel.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fifteen million shekels ~

In October 2007 Global Networks, owned by Guy Cohen, paid about fifteen million shekels for 70 percent of the Hevre group of sites. Globes put the implied valuation at somewhere between 22 and 28 million shekels. The founders walked away with roughly 15 to 20 million shekels between them, six years after building the thing in the first place.

~ the year the floor went ~

2008 is when Facebook arrived in Israel properly and the damage was immediate. By July, Globes was running a piece asking who would save Hevre. The answer the company came up with was to stop being a reunion index and become a social network, competing directly with Facebook and with the Israeli network Mekusharim, on a business model of building branded clubs for commercial companies. The same year, Hevre Date was merged into its competitor Blind Date.

The new Hevre launched in 2009. Instead of communities formed around your school year or your discharge class, you now had to find your friends, send them a request, and collect them on a personal page. It was the Facebook model, shipped by a company whose entire advantage had been that it was not the Facebook model. It failed and closed within a few years. The Hebrew Wikipedia infobox says 2015 and flags its own date as unsourced.

~ the zombie years ~

The archive disagrees with that 2015 date. The homepage at www.hevre.co.il was still answering 200 with a title of Hevre.co.il, Find Your Friends on 7 August 2018, and the page it served was about 7.7 kilobytes of DHTML that branches on document.layers for Netscape and document.all for Internet Explorer. That is code written around 2001 and never touched again, still being handed to browsers seventeen years later.

Somewhere between August 2018 and January 2019 the domain changed hands. Today hevre.co.il answers with 91 kilobytes of WordPress belonging to an Israeli search engine optimization agency that kept the name. The title promises organic Google rankings with no fine print and 99 percent client satisfaction. The address where 1.2 million Israelis once went to find the people they served with now sells placement on the search results those people use instead.

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