Today marks ten years since Hyves stopped as a social network. After its founding in 2004, the Dutch friends site became big with scribbling, tapping, sharing respect and of course the picture of the dancing banana.
There was a time when Hyves had ten million users. Just as everyone now has an account on Facebook and Instagram, everyone was on Hyves back then.
In essence, Hyves was what we still know from social media. You made friends there, you could share photos, videos and messages and there were pages on different topics, so like-minded people could find each other.
The service grew rapidly in the first year after founders Raymond Spanjar, Koen Kam and Floris Rost van Tonningen built a function that allowed people to invite all their Hotmail contacts in one fell swoop. After a year, a million people were on Hyves.
Meanwhile, a number of networks were also emerging in the United States. Facebook and MySpace were engaged in a popularity contest. It is now clear who ultimately won.
Millions of profiles have been archived
Initially, Hyves had little trouble with Facebook. In 2010, Hyves even welcomed its ten millionth member. To this day, approximately nine million profiles can still be found via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. If you remember your account name, you can look it up. That of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, for example, can still be retrieved in this way. He wrote on his profile for example: “As a true VVD member, I used to play hockey.”
This is the saved Hyves profile of Mark Rutte. Photo: Wayback Machine
This is the only way to find old Hyves pages. In 2013, Hyves stopped as a social network. The Dutch founders sold the service at the height of its success in 2010 to De Telegraaf Media Groep (TMG). Hyves yielded 43.7 million euros. A year later, Facebook was bigger than Hyves in the Netherlands for the first time. And Facebook continued to grow.
From friends site to games portal
TMG was unable to keep the attention of Hyves users. Major losses have been incurred since the takeover. The new course from friends’ site to platform for news in 2011 did not help. Two years later, TMG announced that the social network would close down and that the site would become a portal for internet games. It still is today.
Ten years after the closure of Hyves, we mainly use the social media platforms of large American tech companies. For example, the Meta company not only owns Facebook, but also Instagram and WhatsApp. These apps have billions of users worldwide. And services such as YouTube and TikTok, which are less about social contact, also attract millions of people every day.
The dancing banana: a hit on Hyves. Photo: Hyves
New social media platforms come and go
There are actually no Dutch alternatives anymore. Although sometimes attempts are made. For example, PubHubs is being developed, a social network where people can join groups of like-minded people. With the promise that it will not become a ‘looting network’. Your data remains yours. But it is unclear when this network will actually take shape.
The social media landscape continues to evolve, although established companies have been at the top for years. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter proved last year that anything can happen, even at those types of companies. Due to rumblings at Twitter, which is now called X, many people looked for an alternative. For example, services such as Bluesky and Mastodon saw their visitor numbers increase significantly in 2023, although they are still far from matching Facebook and X.
In fact, after Musk’s takeover, the word Hyves was widely shared on the service. Many people longed for a local platform without too much hassle, like Hyves. Who knows, maybe one day that comeback will happen, but for now it will remain just nostalgia.
2023-12-02 12:07:55
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