Hyves

» see hyves.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

hyves launched on october 10, 2004. it was founded by raymond spanjer and floris rost van tonningen, two students in amsterdam, with koen kam joining as the third co-founder. the timing put it almost exactly between the launch of friendster in 2003 and the launch of facebook for non-college users in 2006. for the dutch market hyves arrived first and arrived with a localized product, which mattered: the interface was in dutch, the privacy controls were in dutch, and the cultural style of the place felt native to the country in a way that the imported american networks did not.

growth was steady through 2005 and 2006, then it became national infrastructure. by the end of 2008 hyves had crossed 7 million accounts. by may 2010 the number was over 10.3 million, in a country whose total population was around 16.5 million people. that ratio is one of the highest single-country social-network penetration figures of the entire web 2.0 era. for a window of about five years asking a dutch person "are you on hyves?" was roughly equivalent to asking an american "do you have a phone number?". the answer was almost always yes.

i never used hyves. it was a netherlands-only product with a dutch-language interface, and i was online from turkey on msn and forums in those years. the way i learned hyves existed was through tech press coverage of the european social-network landscape around 2008, where it usually sat in the same article as cyworld for korea, mixi for japan, and orkut for brazil. each of those countries had a homegrown network that beat facebook locally for a window before facebook caught up. hyves was the dutch version of that pattern.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it died ~

the immediate cause was facebook. through 2009 and 2010 facebook localized aggressively into european markets, including a fully dutch-language interface and the open-graph plugin set that made it easy to embed into existing dutch websites. by mid-2011 dutch users had started keeping both accounts open in parallel, and the active-time numbers had begun to tilt toward facebook. in september 2011 facebook overtook hyves in monthly unique visitors in the netherlands, and from that point the curve never reversed. the active user base on hyves dropped from over 10 million to under 2 million across 2011 and 2012.

the corporate parent had changed in november 2010 when telegraaf media groep, a dutch newspaper publisher, bought hyves outright. the acquisition was framed as a strategic media investment, but by 2012 telegraaf had concluded the platform could not be saved as a general social network. the announcement of the shutdown came in october 2013. on december 2, 2013 the social network was officially discontinued. the company kept the brand and the user accounts alive as "hyves games", a flash gaming portal that offered casual games to whoever still logged in. that gaming portal itself was wound down in 2020.

the cause of death was the standard regional-network arc of the early 2010s. local product wins early because it speaks the language and fits the culture. an american competitor with global scale shows up two or three years later, ports its product into the local language, and rides past on sheer feature velocity. the local team cannot match the rate of new features being shipped from menlo park. friendster had already lost southeast asia to facebook the same way, and orkut would lose brazil through the same arc a couple of years later. hyves lost the netherlands on the same curve.

~ what remains ~

the dutch web archive memory. for everyone in the netherlands who came online between roughly 2005 and 2011, hyves was where their profile lived first. wedding photos, school graduation albums, the first decade of dutch teenage online presence. when the social network shut down in december 2013 a lot of that material was lost or only survived in personal downloads. the netherlands web archive at koninklijke bibliotheek picked up some of it. most of the rest is gone.

the proof of localized product strength against an unlocalized incumbent. for about six years a small amsterdam team beat facebook in their home country by being native instead of being global. the lesson did not generalize. by 2012 facebook had localized so far into every european market that the home-team advantage stopped being enough to hold ground. but the hyves window from 2005 to 2010 is still cited in european tech writing as evidence that local social products could win when the global ones had not yet bothered to translate.

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