Dutch social network Hyves is one of the few local social networks that has been able to hold off the Facebook behemoth. Even as properties in other local markets lose ground against Facebook, Comscore is still reporting about 20x as many pageviews for Hyves than the Dutch version of Facebook.
How have they done it? Through a laser like focus on their home market and a steady stream of innovations.
Today at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam Yme Bosma from Hyves spoke a little bit about their latest innovation – mobile payments with a location twist.
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With this service, we move one step closer towards determining a venue’s “mayor” by the amount of $$ spent at that venue, as opposed to number of check-ins claimed.
With the help of Dutch bank Rabobank, Hyves is signing up local bars – about 100 to date – and allowing patrons to access menu information and order directly from their smart phone. This saves the end user time, it saves the end user waitstaff resources and payment processing $$, and of course, it generates an interesting feed of purchase data.
This purchase history data could eventually be used to determine a venue’s top spender, as well as to spark Blippy like conversations about real world purchases. It goes without saying that venues (and patrons) could benefit greatly from more transparency about who the top customers are.
In Dave McClure’s recent rant about the future of geolocation services, he cites mobile payments as a key milestone that the industry must reach to allow these services to grow to their potential.
Hyves may be showing us a glimpse of that future.
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