Finding School Friends
Once upon a time, it was easy to lose touch with people. Nowadays, finding school friends has never been easier. The development of social networking sites has made communication easy. After school and university, life gets hectic with marriage, career and children. Even best buddies can drift out of each other's lives and if they have moved house or moved to a different part of the country, it's difficult to track people down.
In 1995, Randy Conrads founded Classmates.com, a site that re-connected people from the same High School, college, workplace or military unit. The search for finding school friends could even go back to primary school and kindergarten. Today, there are over 40 million members using the site in the United States and Canada. The basic membership is free and members create profiles and view other's profiles. Members post photographs, biographies and state their hobbies etc. Friends keep each other informed on their news. Everyone has roots and it's nice to see those old class photographs and photos from the old neighborhood. The company behind the site also run versions of it in other countries. The German one is called StayFriends.de, Sweden's is StayFriends.se, Austria has StayFriends.at and Trombi.com is the French version.
A married couple in Britain, Steve and Julie Pankhurst, had their own light bulb moment when they set up Friends Reunited in 2000. They worked from the bedroom of their house in the initial stages and their site was the first prominent one of its kind in the UK. It enables people to find school friends and university friends, in addition to other targets, such as workplaces, sports clubs or the military. People can also trace friends from an address. It was an extremely lucrative deal for the Pankhursts when they sold their business to ITV, the television station, for a staggering $208 million in 2005. Many incredible and moving stories have come from its members, including people tracing their first loves and World War II evacuees getting in touch with each other. In 2003, a book was published which collected some of the true stories to emerge from members finding school friends through the site. Friends Reunited: Remarkable Real Life Stories from the Nation's Favourite Website is written by Andrew Collins.
The most famous social networking site in the world is Facebook. It too is used for finding school friends and staying in touch. It launched in 2004 and the aim was to connect people through networks formed around a city, school, workplace or region. Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and he created the site whilst a student at Harvard University. The original membership was just for fellow Harvard students but it opened up to the whole world, give or take a couple of countries. Today, there are 175 million people with Facebook accounts. Members post their profiles, chat with instant messaging and can post any number of photos. In addition to finding school friends, there is the opportunity to join groups with common interests and take part in campaigns.
