Laugh at how your old school friends made such a mess of their lives! (friendsreunited.co.uk)

Member Name: Judgee

Product:	friendsreunited.co.uk
Date:	31/07/02 (586 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Get together with old friends, Laugh at how your old enemies are doing badly

Disadvantages: Members could use the photo facility better

Sceptical as always, I was very slow to look up the Friends reunited site. I always knew I would get around to it eventually and when my friends refused to shut up about it, I eventually took the plunge. Expecting to find maybe a handful of names I recognised, I was actually amazed at the amount of old school pals that had actually signed up for it. Not only that, but the site was still growing. So here's a run down on 'friendsreunited.co.uk.' and what I thought about it!


Logging on to the home page, you are met with several statistics. Claiming that its database contains over 40,000 schools (Infants, Junior, Senior), it certainly looks very impressive. If you are already a member, you can input your details here and go to your own details page. If you are not a member, you can use the menu list on the left-hand side to take a look around. It is definitely worth taking a free look around before joining. Only if you wish to email someone, are you asked to pay the annual fee of £5. I think this is an excellent way of doing business, allowing you the chance to see if it's really worth you joining.


Upon joining you are ask to fill out some details. These are pretty standard, including forename, surname upon leaving, nickname etc. You can also add some relevant information for people to read about yourself, what you have been doing since you left school for instance. There is also a facility to allow you to add a picture. If you had taken a look around previously, you can now add details of the schools you attended, allowing you immediate access to all the information relevant to you, each time you log on ie You can go straight to your school and leaving year!


When I joined, I was amazed at how many old school friends had logged on to the site. Approximately 80 people from my own high school year! You may find that pupils are a bit spread out when it comes to the year of leaving. I found that the people I knew wer
e spread out over a four year span. I guess this was because of people staying on at school to retake GCSE's and/or to study A-Levels. So make sure that you have a good look at the leaving years immediately before and after your own selected one, to enable you to find all the pupils that will interest you.


When I joined the site they had just added a workmates section where you can look up old work colleagues too! Now they have added even more features, which allow you to track down old University friends and people who you may have known through sports and social clubs. I really liked this aspect of the site, particularly the fact that they seem to spend a lot of time and effort on regularly adding new features. Should all these searches fail, you can look for individual names with a search facility, giving you an even better chance of finding those people that just seemed to disappear after you left school!


I have to admit that I was fascinated to read about how people were doing in their lives. Messages are listed and very easy to find. I even emailed a few. Unfortunately NO ONE LOVES ME!!!!! Well, no one from school replied, but then I only emailed a couple! I did however, get a few replies from old work mates and ended up sorting out a reunion because of it. So for me the site has already been a success! One criticism I must add here is that not everybody puts a date on when they last looked at the site or joined. So the people I emailed could have stopped looking at the site or changed their email address a long time ago (Of course they may just hate me!). Perhaps if they added a "this member last logged on, etc" box, it would help to let you know if they still looked at the site!


When you do email someone, it must go through the friends reunited site. This is fair enough as it is the only way to ensure they get their revenue (as you MUST be a member to email someone on the site)


Overall, I
thoroughly enjoyed using this site and I am sent regular emails, letting me know when a new member signs up for my year. The site is constantly changing, with new features being added regularly. As time goes by, the site can only get better as more and more and people add their details to the database. I was a little disappointed at the lack of photos that people have submitted. Most left none at all and those that did, tended to post old school photos and pictures of their children. This was nice, but as you are not limited to the amount you can post, they could have submitted those photos and an up-to-date one of themselves also. Which would have been REALLY interesting! In case any people from other countries are reading this, do not be dismayed, the site also has databases for Australia, France, Holland, Spain, New Zealand and South Africa. So hopefully, people from across the globe can get back in touch with eachother! (One girl from my year submitted her details from Australia, where she now resides!) Totally worth the money, I thoroughly recommend that you at least visit this site to read your old pals messages (and your old enemies!), even if you don't want to join! Oh and there is a message board for each school too, which again is definitely worth checking out to help you reminisce!

For those not interested in looking up friends from the past, they also have an Online Personals database so you could even find new friends or dare I say it, online lurrrrve!




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