Farewell to Friends Reunited after 16 years closed the forerunner of … – The Republic

ARRIVED before Facebook. But Darwinism technological saw succumb. Friends Reunited, the social network created with the aim of bringing together friends lost sight, lowers the blinds. After 16 years. This was announced by its founder, Stephen Pankhurst , in an email and in a post on Medium, which also revealed the birth of a new project: Liife. “This is not in any way a replacement,” he writes, “but two completely different products. Friends Reunited has his days, it’s time to move on to a new Liife”. News that was received by Internet users both nostalgically and with irony. “I just got an email that warns me of the closure of Friends Reunited,” tweets Mark Kelly , “I hope that this will not have an impact on my MySpace account”. Zoe, however, shares the platform Evan Williams his experience: “I just want to say thank you for making it, Stephen. The site was founded when I was living in Dubai, far away from all my friends with whom I went to school. It was a real novelty and I was able to recontact the people I had lost. It was a precursor to Facebook and it’s a shame that it is not grown at the same rate “.
Whether it’s a loss or no, certainly, Friends Reunited is a piece of history of the web. Who had the idea, says Pankhurst, she was his wife Julie. It’s 1999. And Julie, pregnant with her first child, use the Internet to track down the lost grandfather who has never seen. So discover the potential of the new medium. Unsatisfied, she puts her mind that can help you find even the people who have accompanied it during school time. He speaks to her husband, Stephen, and to appear in business, Jason: two developers at that time were trying to build something yourself. “We saw the Internet as the future,” says Pankhurst. From here on Friends Reunited it is only a matter of bytes. Vista now, the first graphics seem crude. But the site is functional: it allows people to register and search for old friends. This is enough. After a few months the two shareholders are forced to give up the previous work, improve the look of the service, introduce new features, plus a subscription fee. In summer 2001, the boom. With 15 million users. In comparison to the planet Zuckerberg billion is peanuts. For its time, however, it is a pretty good achievement. The project grows and incorporates GenesReunited: a way to help people to share research and to find relatives who have information related to the same family. The newtork like, so much so that at first unable to resist the thrusts of MySpace, the social network created in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe . And two years later was bought by ITV, a British private television, for as many as 175 million pounds. The idyll is still little. Facebook, launched in 2004, is already beginning to spread globally. The decline is inevitable.

“I watched from a distance. And yet it was clear that our creature was evolving, while the platform of Menlo Park was growing like crazy,” he says via Skype Pankhurst. “It was sad, but I could not do anything.” Two years ago, he is back at the helm of the site, in the meantime passed into the hands of another tv, DC Thomson, after the decline in the numbers. “We tried to give him one last chance, creating more or less the initial experience. It did not work. We could not even cover costs. You had to make a point and start something new.” That’s why the new project: Liife. Intended primarily to the generation that has made Friends Reunited, focusing on privacy: considered the weak point of Facebook. “The idea originated in a program I created for myself. Ten years ago I found my journals, photos, concert tickets. In short: my old stuff. I decided to digitize through a system: LifeChart. which then I did not pay anything, until today. ” Liife users can share the important moments of their lives, only a small circle of friends, established under the law of reciprocity. “I guess more like a book of memoirs that as a social network, where we would like to relate what happens in your life with what is happening in the world at the same time. It’s just another startup. It will be fun.” Not new, but Pankhurst believes. He knows how things are going in the world of the web: they are not necessarily the ones who are successful ideas, but ones that work best. And who knows: maybe one day Facebook will be replaced. “Now is part of the Internet and for the people has become an integral part of everyday life. I’m not sure that something, one day, can replace it. In the end, though, who knows?”.

Arguments:

friends reunited

social

facebook

myspace

failures

closures

ideas

projects

friends

connections

platform

liife

Starring:

Stephen Pankhurst

Evan Williams

Mark Kelly

Tom Anderson

Chris DeWolfe