Friends Reunited

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FriendsReunited.co.uk is a UK based website that is similar to Classmates.com and other such school-based reunion type sites. Registered users can search schools, universities and workplaces to locate people and make contact with them.

The website was brainchild of Steve and Julie Pankhurst of Barnet, North London. Their curiosity of what old school friends were up to was the underlying inspiration of their dream. The original site was designed in the bedroom of the married couple whilst expecting their first child in 1999. Their first success came after two weeks of operation when they received an email from a man who had met up with an old school friend after 30 years.

FriendsReunited was officially launched in July 2000 and by the end of the year, it had 3,000 members. Since its launch, the website has expanded to launch a dating service and a genealogy element, Genes Reunited which allows users to trace their family tree, and a recruitment service for users to find new jobs. The website has also lent its name to various CDs specialising in popular music of the past (specifically the years 1970 to 1989.)

By February 2001, the site had 19,000 members. By May 2001 the site had 96,000 members. By August, the site had 1,000,000 members.

At the beginning of 2001, FriendsReunited had one server. By August 2001, the site was receiving up to 5 million hits a day and 15 servers were added to cope with the high rate of traffic. By the end of 2002, the site had over 4,000,000 members.

Ex-Financial Times executive Murphy was brought into Friends Reunited as the new Chief Executive in 2005. Murphy helped the website become the eighth-largest site in the UK. By December 2005, FriendsReunited had over 15,000,000 members. It was also in this month that UK TV network, ITV acquired FriendsReunited for £120,000,000 ($208,000,000).

Friends Reunited has become popular enough that its uses have gone beyond the intentions of its founders. According to the Register, potential employers use entries there to identify weak points in job applicants.^[1] Friends Reunited has been used by bitter partners to get revenge on those who have abandoned them^[2] and users have even been sued for the comments that they have made on Friends Reunited about other people.^[3] Friends Reunited features prominently in Ben Elton's detective novel Past Mortem (2004).

In 2005, the similar web site SchoolFriends Australia & New Zealand rebranded to Friends Reunited, merging with the UK site.

Friends Reunited sponsors the new ITV show Prehistoric Park.