Hyves

From IndieWeb

Hyves was a social network silo, mostly popular in The Netherlands, and was discontinued in 2013. At its peak it had a number of registered users equivalent to two thirds of the population of The Netherlands. It continued as games website, using all new accounts and under the new domain hyvesgames.nl.

Exporting your data

It's not possible anymore to get your data back from Hyves. 2013-11-29 was the deadline to get a download link on http://www.hyves.nl/download before 2013-12-31. Those who requested a download link where able to download a zip archive which contained html pages with lists of posts.

Features

Hyves offered some unique features at that time.

  • www / wie wat waar (Dutch for 'who what where') where a kind of notes with an explicit location ('waar'/'where'). Later on some users linked their Twitter accounts to this as an early example of PESETAS. This used the location / 'waar' part of the post as hashtag, which most of the time messed up the location part on Hyves. This could be controlled by tweeting the command '#hyves autopost on'.
  • krabbels was a special section on your profile where other people could leave a public message, typically filled with GIF's and emoticons. The English translation used was 'scrap'. It was possible to post a scrap on your own profile, but the convention was to reply on the profile of the sender.
  • blog Hyves also supported a blog, which could be integrated with an RSS-feed from your own site, enabling automated POSSE.
  • tikken ('to poke' / 'pokes') A post type in the form of '(User A) [text] (User B)', which formed a sentence about those two people. Example from a Dutch forum. These posts could be public or private and were not included in the downloadable zip file.

Indieweb users

  • Sebastiaan Andeweg used Hyves and downloaded his archive. The posts predate his personal domain (first post in 2005 vs domain registration in 2006) but he plans on importing his data anyway, as soon as he has private posts enabled, to shield off some of his youth.