Friends Reunited

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Friends Reunited
Friends Reunited logo
Friendsreunited screenshot.png
Status Closing
Archiving status In progress...
Archiving type Unknown
Project source friendsreunited-grab
Project tracker friendsreunited
IRC channel #friendsununited (on hackint)

Friends Reunited is a social network designed for people to reunited. It was the first social network to gain a large presence in the United Kingdom. The site initially started out as paid but then went to a free model. The site has changed hands several times throughout its life, and at one point was owned by ITV (a large British TV broadcaster). It was setup by a husband and wife duo, Steve and Julie Pankhurst. The site is mainly aimed at UK users.

History

The site was created due to the creators curiosity to discover what had happened to the friends he went to school with. The site was setup in July 2000, and was sold to British broadcaster ITV in December 2005. At this point, the site had over 15 million members. At this point, the site was exceeding the founder's aims and had been used for many more ways than it was designed for. It became one of the sites that employers checked before they hired someone. It had also been used by partners who wanted to extract revenge on their exes. Some users have been sued for the comments that they have made on the site.

By 2007, site was seeing a slowing in growth, with only a 1.2% year on year growth. The site was being drowned out by sites like Facebook and Bebo who had grown hugely in those years. Due to this, the creators of the site then started out with TV advertising.

In 2008, the site then dropped the subscription fee required of users in an attempt to regain control over the huge losses the site had taken. This was also an attempt to gain more users into the site.

Final Years

Friends Reunited was then sold in 2009, to an investment company (Brightsolid Limited) who are owned by a British publisher, DC Thomson. The sale was completed in 2010.

In 2011, the sites owners then said that the site was only worth £5.2 million, which is a fifth of the price that they had paid to ITV a few years before.

In the middle of 2012, the site was relaunched in order to change from a place where school friends would reunite, into a place where people could collect and share memories of the past.

Later in 2013, the sites owners said that the site was "no longer considered an integral part of the company".

Closure

On 18th January 2016, Friends Reunited announced that it was closing. They claimed that "the world was now a different place" and that they could no longer fit in and compete with companies like Facebook.

Site Layout

The site seems to be layed out in a few areas, and requires an account to access it. As of 18/01/2016, the email verification system does not seem to be working.

The pages are setout like this:

  1. http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/Discussion/uuid
  2. http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/Memory/uuid
  3. http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/SchoolName/People/uuid

How can I help?

Running a Warrior

You can start up a Warrior and there select Friends Reunited. (If you don't really care what you are archiving, select ArchiveTeam's Choice instead, as at some points ArchiveTeam may priorize another project.)

Running the script manually

If you use Linux and you're a bit familiar with it, you can try running the script directly.

The instructions can be found at github.com/ArchiveTeam/friendsreunited-grab.

Some additional information
Don't forget to replace YOURNICKHERE with your nickname.

The number after --concurrent determines how many threads run at the same time. You can increase this number if your resources (RAM, CPU, bandwidth) are sufficient. However, if you constantly see messages about rate limiting, there is no need to increase the concurrency.

If you want to stop the script, please do it gracefully if possible. To do so, create an empty file named STOP in the folder of the script (terminal command: touch STOP). The script finishes the current item(s) and stops only after that. (If you kill the script immediately, the items get broken, and they will need to be reassigned to another user.) – Before starting the script again, don't forget to remove the STOP file.

If you see "Project code is out of date", kill the script, go to its folder (cd friendsreunited-grab) and issue git pull https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/friendsreunited-grab. After the updating has finished, re-launch the script.

Donating to the Internet Archive

Content downloaded by the ArchiveTeam will be uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it will be stored and be available – hopefully – forever. However, storing it costs thousands of dollars in the long run. So, if you can afford, please consider donating to the Internet Archive, so that this piece of history can be kept for us all. http://archive.org/donate

Do you like our cause?

If you want to help in other projects, want to learn more about ArchiveTeam, or even help in development in general, navigate to the Main Page of this wiki, from there you can reach a lot of information. The Team consists of volunteers working on the projects in their free time, so helping hands (and resources) are always welcome.

Sources