Hyves
| File:Hyves logo.jpg | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | Amsterdam, the Netherlands (October 10 2004) |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, the Netherlands |
Key people | Raymond Spanjar, Founder Koen Kam, Co-founder Floris Rost van Tonningen, Co-founder |
| Website | www.hyves.net |
Hyves is a free Dutch social networking site and has been online since October 2004. The site was launched by Raymond Spanjar, Koen Kam and Floris Rost van Tonningen. The name Hyves comes from the English Beehive - not from Hives. Since the domain hives.nl was taken, they chose to call their website Hyves. It is not known if the creators were familiar with the skin condition.
The focus of this website is on keeping in touch with existing friends and making new friends. There is no need to have knowledge of HTML for creating a Hyve. Compared to other social networking sites as Facebook and MySpace, the audience of Hyves is younger. As with MySpace, Hyves is very popular among students but not among adults. Hyves is also becoming popular in Peru.
On December 6 2007 Hyves announced that they had reached 5 million users, of which about 4 million are Dutch.[1] This amounts to about a quarter of the entire population of The Netherlands. In 2007, the website was voted "most popular website of the year" in the "Website of the year" competition.[2] In 2006 and 2007 Hyves also won another "Website of the year" competition in the category for blogs and communities.[3]
Because of the popularity among young people even politicians (among them Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende[4]) have their own Hyves. They see this as an opportunity to come closer to the people of a younger generation. As a result of the immense growth of users, the site is regularly subjected to performance problems since the 3 million users barrier has broken. This results in incorrect working links and the slow loading of pages. According to a study of WatchMouse published on the 11th of January 2008, Hyves now ranks among the faster social networking sites. [5] At that time the site had over 5.5 million registered users. On the 30th of March 2008, Hyves has over 6.2 million registered users.
See also
References
- ^ Template:Nl News article on Nu.nl
- ^ Template:Nl Online Awards winners
- ^ Template:Nl Website van het jaar uitslagen
- ^ Template:Nl Balkenende's hyve
- ^ Transclusion error: {{En}} is only for use in File namespace. Use {{langx|en}} or {{in lang|en}} instead. WatchMouse study
External links
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