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Where did FriendsReunited go wrong?
BomoLad
Posts: 17,821
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It used to be so popular didn't it?
Just got an email from them, as I do occasionally, reminding me of whats happened in my 'group' - whatever that is. I don't think I've logged-in since 2009.
But why did things like FB and later twitter take off but FR - fail? They were popular before either of the other two.
Was it that in order to use the service to any useful degree, you had to pay for it? Did they miss the boat there by not understanding that the way to ensure its popularity was to go against every traditionally minded commerce instinct and give the content away for free?
Just got an email from them, as I do occasionally, reminding me of whats happened in my 'group' - whatever that is. I don't think I've logged-in since 2009.
But why did things like FB and later twitter take off but FR - fail? They were popular before either of the other two.
Was it that in order to use the service to any useful degree, you had to pay for it? Did they miss the boat there by not understanding that the way to ensure its popularity was to go against every traditionally minded commerce instinct and give the content away for free?
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The arrival of Facebook (free) was more or less the end of FR.
I certainly wouldn't (and never did) pay to get in touch with someone via a website. I know they are people you once knew, but the way I look at it is, if you were that close a friend, you wouldn't have lost contact in the first place.
Always amazes me on Facebook - the toe rags you never said 2 words to at school are quick to add you and still never speak... I don't think so!
MySpace went downhill when they started allowing users to massively customise their profiles, with all sorts of colours, fonts, logos, music playing as soon as you loaded a page that you could not turn off and all the other annoyances. It could often take several minutes for just one page to load. It became a real pain to use.
I only joined Bebo because some of my family were on it, and I was sent an invitation. But that too started down the MySpace route and became extremely annoying and slow to use. Plus of course, it was really only popular in the UK.
Facebook however, stuck to a simple, clean interface with minimal colours and fonts. Even on a slow connection it was fast to use, and as it became massively popular in the US with everyone abandoning MySpace, we quickly followed suit with everyone here abandoning Bebo. Even today, although you can play all the games, post photos and videos and it has been through several changes, it is still fairly clean and quick to load on a slow connection even though our connections are faster, if you discount the adds. It's also still free (if you avoid Zynga's paid for games content). If FB went behind a paywall it would die a death even quicker than the others did, and FB know this.
So annoying and so thick they must be to follow like sheep.:rolleyes:
It made the owners multi millionaires I'm sure
already in touch with the ones i liked
mind you facebook was more useful in getting me to pick up with some friends i'd lost contact with....but only wanted a distant sterile relationship with online
I bet it made ITV shareholders cry when their idiotic management bought it. There was so much on the market at the time. it was like they were moving into the area and looking at all the houses, and then decided to buy one that was on fire.
That's one of the things I like about FB. Some people slag off FB and say " why don't you just TALK to the folks you like " but I have some friends on mine that I don't WANT to talk to on the phone. I just like to see that they are ok and still alive and sometimes they post great pictures and stories and it is just the perfect amount of contact.
lol yes and then there's some you wish were facebook friends not real life ones:cool:
Or even worse, DS friends.
It did when they sold it, just before it went downhill.
Here:
Numerous emails claiming there'd been an update, when there hadn't. Numerous attempts to unsubscribe from this spam ignored by FR. Asked them to stop otherwise I'd delete my account. They carried on. I deleted my account.
You can bet that, if it wasn't for Facebook and the like, they'd still be charging £5/£7.50/more now.
Facebook took over from myspace which took over from friends reunited
and somewhere some 17 yr old geek is writing something new which will take over
and be the fashionable site to be on
Some might say,Twitter has overtakn Facebook now, I certainly use twitter far more than Facebook.
I don't know who owns twitter but if I were them i'd be getting a bit nervous now in anticipation for the next fad to come along. I'd flog it now to some mug for millions before it becomes obsolete like FR. Wikipedia says this about twitter:
The projections for the end of 2013 were $1.54 billion in revenue, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users.
2013? Nah.
I've only had one contact via it, a childhood friend of 45 years ago...............swapped a few e-mails with some reminiscances
I like looking at the names from school and the area i lived in and checking any profiles and piccies............I was really excited when an old girlfriend appeared on it who i went out with when i was about 15/16...........I'd have loved to have seen a photo but there wasn't one..........:mad:
Can blame her though 'cos i never uploaded a photo or put any info in
Perhaps i find it interesting because these are people i haven't seen for 40 years and more...........some of whom i'd forgotten until seeing a name. Maybe if I'd only left school 5 years ago it wouldn't be the same because those people would be fresh in your mind ?
Some people are best left as a bitter memory of yesteryear.
Oh yeah, plus they started moving the goal posts of who you could and could not send messages to.