Did Friends Reunited miss the social network gravy train?
Published by on June 30th, 2007
I just got a reminder email from Friends Reunited - remember them? Apparently they are sad that I’ve not logged in for a while, then proceeded to explain all the ‘great things’ I can do at the site. Then it came to me… these guys totally let the whole social network thing pass them by.
They had a very large and diverse user base of people connecting through past associations in schools and workplaces. It would have been just too easy to simply switch on the more social side of social networking and tap into an already loyal user base. They had added some inter-user searching and communications, but clearly had their heads stuck firmly up their interbutts while the rest of the web’s users got sucked in to the accelerating social network vortex.
They are trying by introducing new ’social’ style networking tools - rather impotent and smacking of knee-jerk reactions to something they don’t fundamentally understand in the first place - but it really doesn’t cut it.
I’ll bet there would be all kinds of excuses such as their long term strategy being different, varying business models, etc. Bottom line is, these guys could have been as big as Facebook is right now in the social network arena. My guess is they just sat on their past success and did not employ any visionaries capable of watching and predicting internet trends. Doh!
One Response to “Did Friends Reunited miss the social network gravy train?”
June 30th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Spot on Neil, I was thinking the same thing.
But then remember who paid millions for Friends Reunited and then sat on it for a couple of years? Oh yes, ITV.
I couldn’t really figure out at the time what they planned to do with it but assumes they would tie it in with their newly launched ITV Local service http://www.itvlocal.com/ - it’s not there.
Too late now I suspect.