A site that is sadly outdated in the social networking era (friendsreunited.co.uk)

Member Name: thehonesttruth

Product:	friendsreunited.co.uk
Date:	11/11/09 (38 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: -

Disadvantages: --

A few years ago, I decided to join friends re-united, in the hope of maybe getting in touch with friends from the past. Although I still live in the same local area where I attended secondary school, before that my dad was in the army, and we moved around a lot, often at short notice .

You don't have to be a member of the site to search for people you might know - you can simply search for the name of your school (It's not just schools though , but football teams, workplaces, choirs) or by the name of the person you're trying to find . I found it relatively easy to find my schools, but I ran into some difficulty because of the fact we so often moved at short notice . With school classes being grouped by the year of leaving, I actually couldn't remember what year I'd been at which school for my really early days.

I did however manage to track down a friend from primary school in Germany, and also someone from another primary school I attended in Oxford .

So, finding someone doesn't require being a member - but contacting someone does . You used to have to pay for membership, but that is no longer the case, so signing up is a simple matter of providing a few details and clicking a link in a confirmation email . Details it asks for include schools attended and leaving year, which obviously are used to help people track you down.

I exchanged a few messages with my old friends , and also had one or two try and contact me . However, I found the system a little clunky - I kept getting emails from friends reunited whenever someone new signed up from one of my schools, and it got annoying to I filtered them to my junk folder, which of course meant I missed new message notifications .

It was interesting being able to see how people I had known were getting on, and what they were doing with their lives- many had long passages of narrative on their profiles, some even including recent pictures of themselves, of their kids, or even old school photos .

I think, when it came about, Friends Reunited was a brilliant and novel idea, and really was quite a unique website . However, with the advent of social networking sites, in particular Facebook, it is now incredibly easy to get in touch with old friends without needing a seperate dedicated site to do so .

With Friends Reunited, I got in touch with perhaps 4 friends over 3 years of using it. With Facebook, I signed up, added the friends I was currently in touch with, and then saw faces I also knew popping up in their friends list - I've gotten in touch with lots of people this way, and I'm flattered that some people have gotten in touch with me too .

I'll give the site it's credit - it is nicely designed and visually pleasing, with some useful functions , such as photo albums , sharing events and forum facilities . I also like that it is possible to search by workplace, or in the case of armed forces by regiment . But really it offers nothing a social networking site doesn't offer, and in fact offers less.

I'm afraid that while years ago I might have given the site 4 stars, to be honest I think it has now outlived it's usefulness, despite the brilliance of the idea behind it .

2 stars is the most I can give, awarded for smooth design and simple layout, and for the fact that in its day, it really was a very good site .

Summary: -