Friends Reunited To Be Shut Down
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| BBC |
Sad to hear about Friends Reunited closing. First time I had heard of social media was my Mum signing up & making lots of new-old friends!
— Alex Gillham (@AlexKGillham) January 18, 2016
The site was a hit at first and was brought by ITV for £175m in 2005, the company was later sold to comic publishers DC Thompson in 2009 which is probably when you stopped hearing about it and it started to die a slow death. DC then offered it back to creator Steve Pankhurst a couple of years ago who agreed to trial it and see if they could get the site back on track, which it appears they were not.
For all the good it did, more and more social media was accessible by that point with Facebook and Twitter online so you didn't need a specialised site to find old friends. You could just find them, and new friends, elsewhere. It was just as easy and you could talk about what you liked. That doesn't mean however that Friends Reunited wasn't being used, even now it's still being accessed by a few users but not for the purpose it was made for. People were using the site as a message board and it wasn't bringing in any money. You can't leave such a big site like that up just because a couple of members are still clinging on.
Though some people are cracking jokes about the site being shut down, there are more than a few positive stories being shared about what the site did for people. People who got back in touch with old friends and people who met their now partners on there. It's kind of sad to read, thinking how some people are so happy thanks to this one site and now people won't be able to use it to find the same joy again. But most of the registered accounts have been abandoned for years and contact details are now out of date. The company can't stir people to come back when they can't contact them, especially when they can already do the same thing but better on other sites.
@BBC_HaveYourSay So sad, my partner and I met through Friends Reunited 5 years ago after being apart for 25 years.
— Sally Hever (@SallyHever) January 18, 2016
So it's a fond farewell to Friends Reunited. The founder of the company is attempting a new service called Liife which will allow people to share life events online but privately. The service isn't anything new or special and Pankhurst admits that but he hopes that the privacy will make it more preferable to a lot of users.
Rosina is a Songbird rookie with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is hoping that Content Writing will turn out to be a good career choice in the mean time! Follow her @RosinaAtSMF
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Friends Reunited To Be Shut Down
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Rating:
Reviewed by Unknown
on
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Rating:
Unknown
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