I beg to differ...
"There's no such thing as a free, chummy lunch"
Last time I went shark diving, the sharks didn't appear to be paying for their free, chummy lunch...
Friends Reunited could see its carrying value slashed by ITV when the television channel releases its year-end review of past acquisitions. The Sunday Times reported that the review, which is undertaken by ITV CEO John Cresswell, is expected to conclude that Friends Reunited is worth less than when the firm bought it in …
"The Sunday Times reported that the review, which is undertaken by ITV CEO John Cresswell, is expected to conclude that Friends Reunited is worth less than when the firm bought it in December 2005."
And, in a dose of the blindingly obvious, Mr. Creswell, true to form reveals "Erm, well, it would appear, contrary to our expectations, that, er business that don't take any money from their customers, er, don't make any money."
Thank you Mr. Creswell for the blinding ray of insight.
Web 2.0. FAIL.
...the whole "pay £5 to contact your mates" thing was fatally flawed on two counts:
1. Most of the people I went to school with I wouldn't want to speak to again even if you paid *me*.
2. You can do it for free on Facebook, and the FB website is a whole load simpler and slicker than the bag-o-spanners that FriendsReunited was.
I seem to remember that the idea was for ITV to buy FR and then use it as a platform to flog it's shoddy programs to the enormous user base, especially it's on-line progs (I'm assuming they'll appear in the distant future), a great idea on paper but then they'd never heard of social networking at the time had they?
what was missed from the original article "ITV is not the only media company that is having to write down the value of websites acquired in 2005 and 2006. Daily Mail and General Trust has cut the value of dating and shopping websites, while the American firm EW Scripps wrote off almost the entire £210m it paid for the price-comparison website Uswitch."
as Tom Jones would say "Its Not Unusal....." lots of companies which were over valued and bought in the bubble are now getting crunched.
There were far worse offenders in the world of social networking than Friends Reunited - at least they had a business model that involved actually *charging* people for some of the services they use (specifically, sending messages to other users of the service, and restricting profiles such that people couldn't just say "screw paying for this, mail me at myname@domain.com").
Of course, better than Facebook, Bebo and Myspace doesn't necessarily mean "good", but at least they started from a position of knowing they'd need to be bringing money in one way or another.
When I looked for my ex-schoolchums, none of them had registered, they'd just left comments saying "If u need to contact me, my email is: fname.sname(at)site.com
...and no need to register to see it.
The only downside is that if they caught you, you were banned. Erm, yes. All 5 active users had seen your address by then!
Paris. She knows all about wasting money and being f*cked.
So let me get this right...
In MAY... MAY... 2008 they stop charging people for contacting old work collegues or school friends, after errr facebook has been around a good 12 months in the UK, so what customer base they did have who were paying were now getting the service for Free and any new customers have gone to, facebook, myspace, bebo etc... great plan ITV
I have been a member of Friends Reunited for 5-6 years, i've never paid for the service as it just seemed wrong somehow to pay "just for the email addy".
Friends ReunDead me thinks.
(Still nice sale at £120m for a business that was run from home!)
What nobody seemed to notice was that the forms on friendsreunited didn't strip HTML out properly. Combine that with the fact that you could add non-printing characters (a BLINK tag did the job) to the start of your name to get it on the top of the list for your school/Uni/whatever, and you've got yourself a very effective goatse delivery system.
Good times.
I think it will be sold off again by ITV or closed - Its needs development big time but I dont think ITV will want to do this and possible close the site... Its leagues behind FB and I have better contact with school pals through FB than FriendsReunited... It was good for 2000-2004 but I think private ownership by ITV has started the ball rolling.. Just waiting for the obituary now....
I was expecting a cosy feel-good Sunday night drama featuring Robson whotsisface and that big old bird from the Oxo advert (bless 'er) getting together through FR to make sweet sixties-nostalgic music together whilst also rounding up the obligatory serial killer and saving a few fluffy animals.
LB - if you are reading this, I'm only joking I always thought you were hot