Friends Disjointed


There is a site very familiar in the U.K. (probably not as much so in the U.S.) called friendsreunited. Started by a couple here back in 2000 and sold to the television organization ITV in 2005 for 120 million ($200 million). I had joined the site in its early days of 2001 because I was curious about old school friends and was planning to go back to Wales (from California) for a couple of weeks to help myself mentally recover from a tough period.

So having not been on the site for almost 5 years I had to dig around to remember the email address I registered with (all the while thanking Gmail for fact that my current personal address will now live on long after I shuffle of this mortal coil) and after 5 or 6 tries I was finally able to log on and just couldn't believe how awful it has become. It is an unintelligible mess of ads and banners and I suppose is what happens when an old media company decides to buy into 'new' media and has no idea what to do with it.

Of course the other way this works is an old media company such as a newspaper decides they need to build their own online presence to deal with faltering circulation, and they end up with the mess that was my local newspaper when I lived in California, The Ventura County Star.

So the moral is MySpace users beware... oh but thats right MySpace already IS an unintelligible mess...