Friends Reunited promised to put old friends back in touch; in reality it was mostly just an unofficial pioneer in online dating, and a place for bosses to stalk potential employees -- and on that ultimately didn't keep up with the times.
Now the website has (finally) been shut down, more than 15-years after it launched. The floundering website's founder Steve Pankhurst has taken to self-publishing platform Medium to announce its death. "It hasn’t covered its costs and like any business this can’t continue indefinitely," Pankhurst wrote in the post. "Therefore, whilst it’s sad, I believe it’s time to move on and put Friends Reunited to bed. And I feel like I am the right person to do it."
In a separate email to those still signed-up to the website, and posted online by Adam Tinworth, the founder said that Friends Reunited still had people using it but it wasn't worth running anymore. "The site is still used by a handful of members however it has become clear that the site is no longer really used for the purpose it was built for," users were told.
The website has had a turbulent history. Pankhurst launched the website in 2000 from the spare bedroom of his home, along with wife Julie. By 2003 it had three million members, and was seen as an established rival to MySpace and, later, an upstart college project known as Facebook. By 2005 it was sold, to ITV, for more than £125 million -- but the bad days were just ahead. In 2009 the website was sold to DC Thomson for just £25 million. Then, in 2012, Friends Reunited was rebooted as "memory box". At the time the boss of the site, Chris van der Kuyl, said it could rival Facebook as people were "just dumping stuff on there". Facebook now has more than 1.4 billion active monthly users.
In 2014 DC Thompson offered the website's ownership back to Pankhurst and -- unwilling to let it be confined to the resting grounds of the internet -- he wanted to see "what I could do with it". He wrote on Medium: "The first part of our plan was to put Friends Reunited back to make it more like the original site -- that is, listing your schools and memories of your school days." However, this didn't work. Pankhurst said most of the website was used as a message board, and that user accounts were out of date.
Pankhurst now says he is creating a new social network, called Liife, that will be a way for people to store memories -- but he said it will "no way [be] a replacement for Friends Reunited."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
