RIP Friends Reunited?
According to the FT, ITV might be looking to flog Friends Reunited, with analysts predicting that potential suitors would “include rival sites such as Facebook and MySpace”.
Can i be the first to call “bollocks” on this?
Friends Reunited was arguably the first “social networking” website and a pretty decent idea back at the turn of the millennium, if only let-down (from the users point-of-view) by the charging of a fee to contact any old friends you’d found. By the time the company realised nobody liked this and made everything gratis, it was too late – Facebook, Bebo and MySpace had already taken hold. So Friends Reunited is now just another site and almost certainly won’t be bought by anyone who already has a foot in the social networking market.
My money is on ITV selling it (at a massive loss) to some relatively unknown outfit and the brand just disappearing completely within 6 months of the sale…