Late last week I was completely baffled by my own ignorance. Usually I’m fairly aware about what’s happening on the web. But this time I discovered something that I shouldn’t have overlooked. My sister invited me to join Hyves, a friends network website like orkut or Friendster, nothing very special I thought. I signed up for orkut before but stopped using it since no-one I knew was really actively using it. After my orkut experience I kind of ignored all other invitations I got for any service like it, dismissing them thinking people would stop using it after a while like I did.

But like I said, my sister insisted I’d sign up for Hyves. Like I suspected Hyves is very similar to orkut, with slightly more features (though some features are rarely used). But when I started to search for people I knew, Hyves surprised me a lot. Every yes, every search I performed returned the person I was looking for, I couldn’t (and still can’t) think of one name that didn’t return a match. Friends I see regularly and people I know vaguely or which I havn’t seen for over a year all signed up with Hyves. It appears Hyves is very popular in the Netherlands (especially with people from my own generation) and I had not even heard about it!