One of the internet’s pioneer social sites, Friends Reunited, is set to close in the next month after fifteen years of service.
Four years before Facebook became the place to be, and even a couple years before Myspace, Friends Reunited was launched in the year 2000, offering a free-to-join social experience with which old school mates could find one another and reconnect through a messaging service. The Friends Reunited website enjoyed some popularity in its early years and boasted “millions of memories all in one place”.
However, the website’s founder Steve Pankhurst has this week announced that due to the quick growth of other online networks including the aforementioned Facebook and Twitter (which each command billions of users monthly), Friends Reunited (which counted ‘only’ 24 million in 2010) cannot keep up with the shift in modern social trends and continuing the service won’t be an option.
He comments that there is however still some support for Friends Reunited with a ‘handful’ of active users but ‘the world is a very different place’ and for this reason the friendship won’t be living on after this month. Users can still log in right now (if they remember their password – which we don’t) to save any photos they don’t want to lose when the plug is eventually pulled for good.
It’s interesting to see many celebrating this stalwart social site by tweeting out their memories of it with the hashtag #FriendsReunited – especially when hashtags weren’t even a thing when it was first launched.