Friends Reunited, the first social network to find successs in the UK when it launched 12 years ago, has relaunched as a personal archiving and nostalgia service.
The site launched in 2000 as a way for users to reconnect with people from their past, such as school friends, and at its peak had 15 million members. ITV bought the site in 2005 for £175m, only to sell it for £25.6m in 2009. Currently the site has around 1.5 million regular visitors per month.
Brightsolid, which bought Friends Reunited from ITV, has previously focused on paid-for geneology and historical research services. The company is bringing a similar focus to Friends Reunited, and will allow users to collect and share material such as photographs and newspaper clippings into personal timelines.
Friends Reunited currently offers material from services including the Press Association, the Francis Frith collection and the British Library’s newspaper collection, and Brightsolid said it will eventually make six million photographs, two million events and two million places available. The site is free to use, gaining revenue from advertising.
The site sees itself as complementary to other social networking services such as Facebook, and users can install a Friends Reunited application on Facebook allowing their timelines to be shared there.
A study last year found that social network usage accounts for 25 percent of US web users’ time spent online, with Facebook leading the way at more than 53 billion total minutes spent online.
Are you a patent expert? Take our quiz!
Investor appeasement? Apple unveils huge $110 billion share buyback program, as sales of iPhone decline…
Tesla retreats from pioneering gigacasting manufacturing process, amid cost cutting and challenges at EV giant
No skynet please. After the US, UK and France pledge human only control of nuclear…
Microsoft's AI investments continue in south east Asia, after investments in Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, as…
New chapter for LastPass as it becomes an independent company to focus on cybersecurity, after…
US FCC seeks to ban Chinese telecom firms at centre of national security concerns from…