Friends with out of date profiles! (friendsreunited.co.uk)

Member Name: stebiz

Product:	friendsreunited.co.uk
Date:	20/07/09 (52 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free Information relating to former friends and colleagues

Disadvantages: Much information is out of date

I remember first signing up to this website in about 2001. It was quite a fledgling site at the time with only a few thousand members (if my memory serves me right). Over the coming years it received more and more publicity on the radio and tv, encouraging people to make contact with old friends from school and university. This had the desired effect that millions of people signed up, and this made the site very popular.

The site allows people to create a profile. This starts with your age and DOB, along with the schools that you have been to. This allows others to search you by name or school year. A fantastic idea. Going back a few years the only way you could actually contact others though was through the site itself. This cost about a fiver and this is how they made money to run the site. I have never actually contacted anybody through friendsreunited but I know those who have. All I have done is read about how others have got on since leaving school. Interesting to see how the school bully ended up being a nurse, and the big fat lad ending up running for England in the Olympics - of course I'm only kidding but you get the idea.

The country's largest commercial broadcaster bought Friends Reunited in 2005 for £120m, which has been rapidly superseded by the likes of MySpace and Facebook.

ITV bought Friends Reunited for a whopping 120 Million in Dec 2005, with another fee of upto £55 Million before 2009, depending on performance. In the six months to June 2008 the website pulled in revenues of £10m. However this had declined on the year before and is likely to do so in the future with competition from the likes of facebook.However it appears that Friends Reunited are not going to take this lying down. They have since added Genes Reunited, Friends Reunited Dating and Friends Reunited Jobs.

Personally I think that Friends Reunited has seen its best days. Much of the information refering to pupils is out of date, and it no longer has the same appeal to me as it once did. It is rumoured that ITV are looking to sell it.

Summary: Worth surfing around if you have some spare time to spend!