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Once arguably the best-known “social networking” site in the UK, even before the term social-network was widely used, Friends Reunited recently been redesigned to give it a new “contemporary” feel. According to Airlock, the London-based agency responsible for the facelift, there has been a “dramatic” improvement in activity since the launch. But is it all too little too late?

It is interesting reading the history of Friends Reunited to see just how dramatic the rise of the school-friend catch-up site was. Launched officially in July 2000, by the end of the year it had 3,000 members, a number that had increased to 2.5 million a year later. By 2005, Friends Reunited had been the centre of a TV show (The curse of Friends Reunited), resulted in libel payouts and attracted 15 million of us to the site. Looking back, it seems crazy how a site that demanded payment to actually contact anyone could become so popular.

When ITV bought the site at the end of 2005, there was every reason to believe that the site would continue to grow in popularity. Facebook was, at the time, a high school network, only opening up to key companies in 2006. However many of the features which have come to define modern social networking sites, including the ability to make friends and communicate with these friends for free, were not a part of Friends Reunited. It seems that over the next year or two social networks moved on whilst Friends Reunited stood very much still.

My experience of the new Friends Reunited site was generally positive, albeit this was when I recently deleted my profile (having not been able to unsubscribe from emails without logging into my profile, I thought that having gone to the effort of figuring out my username and password that I may as well just go the whole hog and delete my entire profile). The new design is very much in the “web 2.0” mould; stripes, gradient-background titles, uncluttered.

The new features also go some of the way towards replicating the key features of modern social networks. It seems that it is now possible to join up with friends, and all monetary barriers have been removed (it’s free!). From the new-look homepage it looks like there’s a news feed feature and more of a focus on sharing pictures.

But do people need another social network? I personally don’t know a single person who uses Friends Reunited regularly, and this is going to be a huge barrier to wanting to use the site. Whereas most people I know do use Facebook. Now I don’t even like Facebook (I’ll save that for another day) but I think the key thing here is that if I do want to contact one of my friends, Facebook is currently the place to do it – simply because of the number of people who do use it.

I think another problem with Friends Reunited is that it’s lost much of the original purpose and focus. The original idea was simple – log in and find out what your friends are doing. Right now I’ve been there and done that. I don’t actually care anymore what everyone from school is up to; and the people I am vaguely interested in are all on Facebook.

In place of the focus of the original site, Friends Reunited now offers an expanded set of features, including Genealogy (Genes Reunited of course!) and dating.

So has the horse already bolted? Alexa traffic graphs seem to suggest that interest in Friends Reunited did increase markedly after the new launch (June 2008), although shown over a ten month period traffic is still definitely decreasing.

Compare this traffic with Facebook and Bebo and you start to get the impression that the founders of Friends Reunited got a good deal, and maybe ITV should have kept their money in their pocket! (Hint: Friends Reunited is the blue line that runs at a parallel to, and infinitesimal above, the x axis).

It will be interesting to see if the redesign can have a long term impact on Friends Reunited, or if the horse really has well and truly bolted.

Tags  communicating digital marketing Facebook friends Friends Reunited Genes Reunited horse bolted ITV redesign social networking tv