![\"friendsreunited\"](\"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/friendsreunited-300x111.jpg\")
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Arguably the first ‘social network site’ Friends Reunited is now sending ‘Dear John’ emails to everyone who has ever registered with the website.<\/p>\n
Friends Reunited was, in its day, the first generic catch-up, webservice.<\/p>\n
The Next Big Thing (MySpace) didn’t hit the ground until 2003.<\/p>\n
The Next Next Big Thing (Facebook) started up in 2004.<\/p>\n
Friends Reunited started off being largely focussed on catching up with old school friends.<\/p>\n
Stories with\u00a0Friends Reunited labels soon began to feed the tabloids.<\/p>\n
A lot of those stories were untrue. Fewer were accurate.<\/p>\n
The Daily Mail, in particular, loved to dwell on Friends Reunited tales.<\/p>\n
Newspaper stories of former schoolfriends hooking up, and then leaving their families, to rekindle playground romances, abounded.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What happened to the class bully from secondary school? He became a police officer? No kidding.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Except we can’t do that any longer.<\/p>\n
After 16 years of operation, the Friends Reunited webservice is going, going, and possibly, by the time you read this, gone.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t one of the few who were featured in the Daily Mail.<\/p>\n
I also didn’t attend any of the school reunions that were sometimes organised.<\/p>\n
And yet, what I did get from Friends Reunited was far more tangible than any of those things.<\/p>\n
Through the sterling efforts of others, I was able to look at some scarily memory-jogging photographs of my school years.<\/p>\n
Like those freshly-jogged memories, I’ll keep those photographs to myself.<\/p>\n
The history of the Friends Reunited venture is informative as to how unbelievably fortunate the people who started the company were.<\/p>\n
Also interesting is how external organisations, greedy for extra revenue streams, viewed the earnings potential of Friends Reunited.<\/p>\n
Given the relative immaturity of web-based advertising in those formative Internet years, that view can best be described as naive.<\/p>\n
Naivety surrounds the Friends Reunited story, as does unbelievably good\u00a0luck on the part of the founder.<\/p>\n
Friends Reunited stats:<\/p>\n
And has the naivety gone the way of Friends Reunited?<\/p>\n
No.<\/p>\n