Has Friends Reunited Missed the Boat?

On first viewing it passes as a trailer for an avant-garde independent feature film doing the rounds from continental Europe; orange-tinted soft lighting, melancholy almost motionless characters clustered together in a variety of locations, it pulls at the cords of curiosity. However, as it reaches its conclusion the revelation is something quite unexpected:

Friends Reunited is now free!

The ad is of a stylised high quality; it has a The Man Without a Past pace and sombreness about it. Clearly the TV ad people at Friends Reunited are rightly influenced by cinema; a year or so back they ran a TV campaign that paid homage to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall; kids in the classroom stand to proclaim what they have become in adulthood, albeit in a diluted television version.

So Friends Reunited is now free was the revelation. Once the interest of the ad wears off a question may present itself; have they missed the boat?

When Friends Reunited burst on to the scene it was an instant success, taking social networking up a notch. In 2005, ITV purchased the site from its creators for a generous price and continued to grow the empire adding extras, such as genes, dating, military and so on. But in the world of IT freedom, expression and open source, Friends Reunited’s policy was to pay to find, which suppressed its purpose.

On lookers took heed, remodelled the idea and presented without charges, leaving the Friends Reunited Empire vulnerable. Its flawed pricing strategy hindered Friends Reunited’s potential and when something fresher, more organic appeared, Facebook, only then did the idea of social networking start to fulfil its real potential.

“it’s like Friends Reunited but better and free” one converter to Facebook told me once.

And since Facebook, Friends Reunited has fallen in to perpetual decline, regardless of the huge stated ’19m’ on the website, so much so in fact that now, just like its successor; Facebook imitated it, it now has imitated its successor by becoming free.

With a huge TV organisation behind them, advertising on tap, positions of influence to ensure prime time TV sponsorship and a redesign with flashy applications, Friends Reunited maybe hasn’t missed the boat, but whilst Facebook is cruising around the Med in a luxury yacht, Friends Reunited is rowing in circles in the middle of the North Sea.

Mad – Friends Reunited Relaunch