Reunion.com

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This article is about the social network service. For other uses, see Reunion

Reunion.com

URL	http://www.reunion.com/
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Social network
Registration	Required
Owner	Privately held
Created by	Jeffrey Tinsley

Reunion.com is a social network service founded in 2002 by Jeffrey Tinsley after meeting his wife at their high school reunion. The company began with the acquisition of highschoolalumni.com and PlanetAlumni.com^[1]. The website claims to help members find and keep in touch with friends, relatives and lost loves.

Reunion.com is the 6th top social networking site as of August 2007. Reunion.com claims to have 28 million members, growing by nearly 1 million new members each month^[2], mostly in the United States and Canada.

Reunion.com is expanding the reach of its people search capabilities. On April 30, 2007 it was announced Reunion.com had signed an agreement with Wink to provide Wink's people profiles (from on-line social networks and other sources on the web) to Reunion's members. Then on August 20, 2007 Reunion.com announced an agreement with ZoomInfo to provide ZoomInfo's business related people profiles to Reunion.com members.

1 Memberships
2 Privacy
3 Ownership
4 Financing
5 Business model
6 Better Business Bureau
7 References
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] Memberships

Reunion.com has 2 types of members: Free Members and Premium Members. Free Members can

create personal profiles for others to find/view, including a public profile non-registered visitors can view
post photos to their own photo albums
search for people that are also members
view photos of other members
send announcements to other members and non-members
create blogs
add themselves to their high school listings
store information in their own address books
write and read message board postings
read and reply to messages from other members
browse for photos, members, or blogs on member attributes such as gender or age
view newsfeeds of their contacts and classmates' recent activities
"nudge" a classmate to update their profile

Premium Members, who pay an annual fee, can also do the following:

see who has searched for members with their name (a reverse search feature)
see who has visited their profile
send new messages to any member
use website tools for planning reunions and events
read more detailed profiles about other members
send internal mail to another member

[edit] Privacy

Reunion.com members use real names, not screen names. Member privacy is protected through a blind relay e-mail system, so e-mail addresses and contact information are never revealed unless self-disclosed by members one-on-one. Upon registering, however, it is possible to unwittingly allow Reunion to access all your email addresses stored on your computer, which are then used, under your name, to solicit more members.^{[citation needed]} [1]Lazarus, David. "Too much Contact at this Reunion", Business, Los Angeles Times, 2008-04-16. Retrieved on 2008-05-05.

Reunion.com is known to acquire the real names, birth date, high school and colleges attended by individuals and create profiles on their behalf. These profiles may be intended to falsely draw in friends or family of these individuals.

Reunion.com has exploited email lists of users to dupe others into subscribing to find out that they really were not contacted by people that they already knew. There is significant question as to whether this is either ethical or constitutes a form of fraud. At this time no legal action appears to be made against Reunion.com to cease this practice or refund subscription fees paid by duped subscribers. Best advice... do not subscribe to Reunion.com under any circumstances. It is particularly suspect that when you subscribe the one person who shows up in your friend s list is the founder, Jeffrey Tinsley, which is obviously false for the vast majority of subscribers who have no clue who he is.

Reunion.com duped me into allowing them access to all the email addresses I have in my contact list. I didn't know emails were being sent to everyone until it was going. Shame on Reunion.com.

Reunion.com accessed my wife's address book and sent emails to everyone stating:

             "I looked for you on Reunion.com, but you weren't there. Please connect with me so we can keep in touch. Do you know XXXXXXX?"

" Yes " " No " <-- Buttons that link to their login page

  "Tell us, and see who's searching for you! "

[edit] Ownership

Reunion.com, Inc. is privately owned. The original investors, making a total investment of $1.4 Million in angel financing, included Internet veterans Jeffrey Tinsley, former founder and CEO of GreatDomains.com and current CEO of Reunion.com; Richard Rosenblatt, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Demand Media and the former Chairman of MySpace; and Andy Mazzarella, CEO of eForce Media and former CFO of iMall.

[edit] Financing

On April 16, 2007, the company announced that it received $25 Million in venture funding from Oak Investment Partners^[3] in the largest series A venture financing in a social networking company to date. The percent ownership stake that Oak received for their investment has not been reported.

[edit] Business model

The company’s business model is based on user generated content and revenue from paid subscriptions and advertising sales.

[edit] Better Business Bureau

This company practices what the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau calls negative option cancellation. In this sales strategy, customers agree to pay for services unless they cancel within a specified period of time. Members are required to cancel prior to the initial anniversary date to avoid continuing annual charges to their credit cards.^[4] Reunion's FAQ provides instructions for turning off automatic renewal.

Complaints from customers not resolved in a satisfactory manner caused the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau to rate Reunion.com 'F', the lowest rating of the eleven they use to rate businesses.^[5]

The BBB was concerned that the company used misleading advertising practices by e-mailing customers advising them that people 'may' be searching for them, and offers them to become paid members to find the identity of any people that may search for them in the future. In its FAQ section, the Reunion.com site describes this feature as follows: "'Who's Searching For You' will reveal the listed names of the specific users who have performed a search using your first and last (current or Maiden) names and your age range within 5 years of your listed date of birth and is still saved in their Search History'.^[6]