Hyves is a free Dutch social networking site which 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, hereby comparing the users to bees in a hyve.

Since the domain hives.nl was already registered, they chose to call their website Hyves. 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.

It is comparable with other social networking sites. Users can create personalized pages of themselves with rich media content, such as photos, videos, flash content and custom layouts. In July 2008 Hyves announced that they had reached 7 million users, of which about 5 million were Dutch.

This amounts to about a third 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. In 2006 and 2007 Hyves also won another "Website of the year" competition in the category for blogs and communities.

Because of the popularity among young people, even politicians (among them Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende) 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. At that time the site had over 5.5 million registered users.

As of August 2008, Hyves has over 7.1 million registered users.

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