Friends Reunited Relaunches As Nostalgia Site

Friends Reunited, the first social network to find successs in the UK when it launched 12 years ago, has relaunched as a personal archiving and nostalgia service.

The site launched in 2000 as a way for users to reconnect with people from their past, such as school friends, and at its peak had 15 million members. ITV bought the site in 2005 for £175m, only to sell it for £25.6m in 2009. Currently the site has around 1.5 million regular visitors per month.

Nostalgia focus

Brightsolid, which bought Friends Reunited from ITV, has previously focused on paid-for geneology and historical research services. The company is bringing a similar focus to Friends Reunited, and will allow users to collect and share material such as photographs and newspaper clippings into personal timelines.

Multimedia sharing has already found success with websites such as Pinterest and Tumblr.

Friends Reunited currently offers material from services including the Press Association, the Francis Frith collection and the British Library’s newspaper collection, and Brightsolid said it will eventually make six million photographs, two million events and two million places available. The site is free to use, gaining revenue from advertising.

The site sees itself as complementary to other social networking services such as Facebook, and users can install a Friends Reunited application on Facebook allowing their timelines to be shared there.

A study last year found that social network usage accounts for 25 percent of US web users’ time spent online, with Facebook leading the way at more than 53 billion total minutes spent online.

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