Body Class Pimp

November 27, 2013 3:40 PM

"The Dutch social network Hyves didn't chase its users in white clean profiles (like Facebook), and it also didn't allow them to build their own web sites (like Geocities, Tumblr). Instead, for almost 10 years, it was going with the Pimp My Profile model (Myspace): users were allowed to change the avatar, colors of texts and other elements, background image and its position. Not a lot, but the users of Hyves developed the mastery of talking to the world through the choice and combination of userpic and wallpaper." (From Contemporary Home Computing, Olia Lialina. Via @cory_archangel)
posted by grobstein (9 comments total)

From the Idioms link on the Contemporary... start page:

Norton AntiVirus just makes sure nothing works anymore, including viruses.
posted by signal at 3:53 PM on November 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

We just succesfully managed to get the damned thing buried by social pressure and lack of social presense. Why not keep the thing sfu? One maelstrom of idiocy less in this world, that's a good thing, right?
posted by stthspl at 5:02 PM on November 27, 2013

A bit of context.
posted by unliteral at 6:15 PM on November 27, 2013 [6 favorites]

So is that level of brand obsession typical for Dutch society or just for users of that network?
posted by Jacqueline at 6:27 PM on November 27, 2013

So the name refers to what minimalists get on visiting the site, I guess.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:59 PM on November 27, 2013

And now it's gone, as everybody fecked off to Facebook. But not before it was bought for way too much money by an old media conglomerate.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:36 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the context, unilateral, that was a fun read. I especially liked this little turn of phrase from it:

"now, who can ever refuse a drop shadow?"
posted by Doleful Creature at 1:13 AM on November 28, 2013

And now it's gone, as everybody fecked off to Facebook. But not before it was bought for way too much money by an old media conglomerate.
posted by MartinWisse at 7:36 on November 28 [1 favorite +] [!]

Well, they might have fled to Facebook for a while, but as a matter of fact, Dutch teenagers have left Facebook too, over the last year and a half (Hyves was popular in all age groups for a while, but mostly with teenagers).
posted by Ms. Next at 6:57 AM on November 28, 2013

Archive Team is taking a backup of Hyves. Our first run-through yielded 8.7 million accounts in 24 terabytes.
posted by jscott at 11:54 AM on November 28, 2013