Arguably the first ‘social network site’ Friends Reunited is now sending ‘Dear John’ emails to everyone who has ever registered with the website.
Friends Reunited was, in its day, the first generic catch-up, webservice.
The Next Big Thing (MySpace) didn’t hit the ground until 2003.
The Next Next Big Thing (Facebook) started up in 2004.
Friends Reunited started off being largely focussed on catching up with old school friends.
Stories with Friends Reunited labels soon began to feed the tabloids.
A lot of those stories were untrue. Fewer were accurate.
The Daily Mail, in particular, loved to dwell on Friends Reunited tales.
Newspaper stories of former schoolfriends hooking up, and then leaving their families, to rekindle playground romances, abounded.
For most of us, though, Friends Reunited offered a chance to covertly spy a little on how the lives of how our past schoolfriends (and schoolenemies) had turned out.
What happened to the class bully from secondary school? He became a police officer? No kidding.
What happened to that lovely girl from the year above? After university she got married to her long-time school sweetheart (awwww), and half a dozen years later left him for the guy who was the school’s German tutor? Wow.
And what about that person with the betwitching smile that you always had a crush on? How did they turn out? Well let’s check out Friends Reunited.
Except we can’t do that any longer.
After 16 years of operation, the Friends Reunited webservice is going, going, and possibly, by the time you read this, gone.
I wasn’t one of the few who were featured in the Daily Mail.
I also didn’t attend any of the school reunions that were sometimes organised.
And yet, what I did get from Friends Reunited was far more tangible than any of those things.
Through the sterling efforts of others, I was able to look at some scarily memory-jogging photographs of my school years.
Like those freshly-jogged memories, I’ll keep those photographs to myself.
The history of the Friends Reunited venture is informative as to how unbelievably fortunate the people who started the company were.
Also interesting is how external organisations, greedy for extra revenue streams, viewed the earnings potential of Friends Reunited.
Given the relative immaturity of web-based advertising in those formative Internet years, that view can best be described as naive.
Naivety surrounds the Friends Reunited story, as does unbelievably good luck on the part of the founder.
Friends Reunited stats:
- Started in 2000 by Steve Pankhurst
- Bought by ITV in 2005 for £175m
- At its peak, the service had 25m users (compare that to the 1.44 billion users Facebook now has)
- Dundee-based publishers DC Thomson, bought it from ITV in 2009 for £25 million (giving ITV a stunning loss of £150 million on their transaction)
- Closed down in 2016 by DC Thomson, given them a much smaller loss on their £25 million purchase price
And has the naivety gone the way of Friends Reunited?
No.
Only last week, in an interview in the Daily Telegraph, the founder of Friends Reunited said ‘I’m probably the only 52-year-old to use Snapchat’.
Really, Steve?
You don’t think that’s a stupid thing to say?
A thing that shows the world just how empty your barrel of new ideas is?
To me, that wildly inaccurate statement says a lot about the man’s lack of knowledge, and his absence of imagination.
For me, the writing was firmly on the wall of Friends Reunited when I learned the website had a Facebook page.
I signed up to FR when it first started up and lost interest in it almost immediately.
It was through FR that I remembered why I didn’t keep in touch with all but one of my school friends.
And who knows… in ten years time, you might be writing a similar post about TwitFace!
In ten years time we’ll be retired, watching our robots tend the weeds while we try to remember what we went in to the kitchen for.
I did get quite heavily into it. We had the reunions in real time and at one managed to get 33 of us in touch with each other. This coming October, six of my school friends, of which I was still only in contact with two since school, are coming out to visit for the weekend. Included in those other four were the guy who brought the Magnificent M along with him to a reunion as she knew a couple of the guys. I await the Daily Mail’s phone call!