ITV have announced today that they are to sell Friends Reunited for £25 million despite having agreed to pay £175 million for it back in 2005.
Remember Friends Reunited? Way back before Google and Facebook ruled the earth and you could only use the internet if the phone was not being used Friends Reunited took the UK by storm by giving users the ability to keep in touch with their old school friends.
Back in what now seems more simpler times users registered their profile in their appropriate leaving year slot on their schools and could view the profiles of anyone else’s profile from the same (or other) year(s). People’s profiles were very limited and contained a snippet of what they were up to and a photo. However if you wanted to contact any of your friends you needed to sign up to a paid membership…of course this is probably where their plight began.
Then social networking evolved and with it we had sites like MySpace, Bebo, and more importantly Facebook. Sites that are very easy to use, allow you to store and share megabyte loads of information and to top it of are free to use! This spelt the end of what was once perceived as a very revolutionary social networking tool and although Friends Reunited opened up the ability to network for free on the site you could say it was too little too late.
Although not dead and buried just yet this news is a real eye opener on how much the internet has changed and how far we have come. It almost feels like we are talking about something that existed tens of years ago however it is only 9 years since Friends Reunited was launched. It makes you wonder what we have in store for the next 9 years…