Friends Reunited

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Friends Reunited is a portfolio of social networking websites based around the themes of reunion with former friends, family-history research, dating and job-hunting.

Each site works on the principle of user-generated content by which registered users are able to post information about themselves that can be searched by others. People can contact each other via a double-blind email system, but only after paying a subscription.

The main Friends Reunited site is concerned with reuniting people who have in common a school, university, address, workplace, sports club or armed service; the sister-site Genes Reunited enables members to pool their family trees and identify common ancestors; the Dating and Jobs sister-sites link members with similar attributes, interests and/or locations.

The website claims 18 million registered users, which it believes equates to "about half of all UK households with internet access"^[1].

Friends Reunited branding has been attached to CD collections of nostalgic popular music, and television programmes broadcast on the ITV network, which owns the site. A book of members' stories was published in 2003 by Virgin Books.

1 History
2 References
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

The website was brainchild of Steve and Julie Pankhurst of Barnet, North London in 1999. Their curiosity of what old school friends were up to was inspired them to develop the website, identifying a gap in the market following the success of US website Classmates.com^[2]. Friends Reunited was officially launched in July 2000 and by the end of the year, it had 3,000 members. Ex-Financial Times executive Murphy was brought into Friends Reunited as the new Chief Executive in 2005 and the similar web site SchoolFriends Australia & New Zealand was rebranded and merged with the UK site^{[citation needed]}. By December 2005, Friends Reunited had over fifteen million members and was bought by British TV company, ITV plc for £120,000,000 ($208,000,000) ^[3].

FriendsReunited 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.^[4] Friends Reunited has been used by bitter partners to get revenge on those who have abandoned them^[5] and users have even been sued for the comments that they have made on Friends Reunited about other people^[6]. Friends Reunited features prominently in Ben Elton's detective novel Past Mortem (2004). The website is set to launch a series of television advertisements for the first time, in early 2007^[7].