What happened to Friends Reunited

What happened to Friends Reunited?

Friends Reunited was established in the year 2000, right at the heart of the dot.com bubble and quickly became wildly popular as the very first well used social media website. The service tapped into a nostalgic longing in its customers for lost friends and especially lost loves. Friends reunited became the place to get back in touch with your old school colleagues or college buddies. At its peak there were over 15 million members of Friends Reunited and ITV bought the company in 2005 for £175 million. Not ITV’s most sensible move. Four years later they sold the company on for only a little over 25 million and by this point the service was in fast decline as more snazzy competitors gulped up its market share; not least amongst them the social networking giant Facebook.

So what has happened to Friends Reunited today? Two things:

Most recently the brand name has seen a revival at the hands of dating experts Cupid.com. Cupid has taken the still recognisable name and set up a new website called Friends Reunited Dating. This has nothing really to do with the original, but reflects the fact that Friends Reunited was often as much about dating and rekindling old flames as it was about anything else. Friends Reunited Dating has recognised this fact and set up what we think is really quite a nice new dating service.

Meanwhile, Friends Reunited remains live, but only just. There was something of re-launch in March 2012, but it didn’t amount to much more than a press event. There has been little development or design reworking past the front page and the bulk of the site still looks like an early naughties project in stasis. In point of fact, there is still information on the site about some of your old school or college friends. If you complete the very simple registration process, and your over 35, you will probably find the odd name you recognise from your school days with a tiny bit information about what happened to them. However, mostly this information is also out of date, so all you will get is a good idea of what had happened to your friends five or six years ago. If you want to know how their getting on now, you might be better off on facebook.