Comments on: The venerable Friends Reunited preps a relaunch

By: Development : Design : Code » Blog Archive » Could have Friends Reunited been Facebook?

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:01:32 +0000

[...] Techcrunch [...]

By: Craig Cockburn

Craig Cockburn — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:38:28 +0000

The friends reunited concept is well past its sell by date. Not only is the concept of charging to contact people quite laughable in the face of the large social networks, but the entire concept of people losing track of one another after leaving high school because they didn’t have email is about as dated as Adam Ant and Culture Club. Since everyone in high school now has email, they are now much less likely to lose contact and need a website to reunite them.

By: links for 2008-01-08 | jon bounds

links for 2008-01-08 | jon bounds — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:21:15 +0000

[...] Friends Reunited to drop sbscription model? ITV is planning to ditch Friends Reunited’s subscription model and associations with ITV (wise move) and make it advertiser-funded. According to Hitwise Friends Reunited was the 14th-most-visited social networking site with a 0.53% share of UK visits la (tags: socialnetwork freindsreunited advertising) [...]

By: paulpod

paulpod — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:30:43 +0000

They should just build a nice robust Facebook app to allow people to connect up (re-connect) via that. Friends Reunited-on-facebook would be interesting right now.

By: Chris Fleming

Chris Fleming — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:48:26 +0000

Mike also… for the e-mail addresses that are alive how many of those people are now using another Social Networking site.

It will be hard to lure users back.

By: Dan Field

Dan Field — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:42:57 +0000

Mike, definitely….

If a good number of the email addresses are now dead and they are re-branding… haven’t they just thrown all the value of the business out of the window?

£120m in December 2005 (Value gone?), + cost of redevelopment and new brand building… that an expensive way of doing things!

By: Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:36:23 +0000

I guess the question is, how many of the emails attached to FR accounts are now dead… My guess is quite a lot.

By: Chris Fleming

Chris Fleming — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:25:34 +0000

I think that ITV may have missed the boat here. They could have held a huge amount of ground if they had taken the bold step of making it free to stay in contact and opened things up a bit more.

However people (from my year/school) have stopped updating there profiles some time ago and it will be hard to get them back.

By: Dan Field

Dan Field — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:00:14 +0000

Maybe it will be renamed as marriage reunited then? Fix all of the broken marriages they caused?

Seriously though, I think the biggest problem with the existing site is the UI combined with the fact you had to pay to be able to do anything meaningful with the site…. how many millions of potential “real” members have they lost due to this?

By: Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:37:57 +0000

Dave Briggs – Very good point. The name has passed into UK folklore. But maybe they think it will ‘refresh’ the idea? More likely they will try to point it in less ‘reunited’ direction. I mean once you’re ‘reunited’ with your old school pals there’s not much else to do is there? (Other than get divorced, as the site is famed for).

By: Dave Briggs

Dave Briggs — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:28:53 +0000

Name change?

I would have thought that’s the only thing FR has got going for it. Surely it would be daft to throw that away?

By: Alasdair Allan

Alasdair Allan — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:41:28 +0000

The real problem with Friends Reunited was it was so slow. Painfully slow, dreadfully slow. You could hear the hardware creaking as the pages generated.