Friends Reunited is again for sale, ITV attempts to rehash the site has left it a poor runner to facebook ...no surprises there!!!

Personally FR since its rehash irritates the hell out of me, axing its annual subscriptions is no compensation for its no longer user-friendly approach , slow connection speed etc all lead to internet rage . to say nothing of its clean up purge over references to school CP.

Could this spell the beginning of then end., will those few remaining historical memories be salvaged or obliterated forever. Should some gullible buyer come forward , I fear the latter.

Ketta

As Ketta says the current Friends Reunited is indeed a mess. In my opinion the worst designed mass usage site on the web, although eBay with its constant pointless revamps is bidding fair to challenge it.

The general ethos used to be "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Nowadays this has been changed to "if it ain't broken, why not, and how can we break it?" Friends Reunited, eBay, and various other once useful websites are the victims of this. Happily this estimable Forum has largely escaped this urge to destroy, although the dreaded 'daylight saving' may prove the start of the rot!

It will be interesting, but almost certainly sad, to see what befalls Friends Reunited.

Yes, I too think it may have had its day. I don't see a queue of buyers rushing forward, and I think that many of those who are on there are, like myself, of a certain age. I found a couple of old school friends through it, and other people with whom I'd worked in the past, but as Ketta says, the site was emasculated a while ago, and hasn't been the same since.
Apparently ITV (one of the British independent TV networks for our non-British viewers), bought it because they thought it was a good source of advertising revenue via the internet, promptly re-built the site, and are now wondering why everyone has disappeared(!).
For those of us on this forum, the deleting of references to corporal punishment was the most disappointing aspect of the take-over. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and believe it may have been for legal reasons, given how litigious the UK has become in recent years, but the whole thing has become a shambles. Still, the couple who invented it, Steve and Julie Pankhurst, must be enjoying the £120m they got for it from ITV!

FR is much harder to get around than it was, but not impossible.

It's just sanitised for the sake of it & that of the advertisers.

Must say the redesigned E-bay imposed on me in the last few days is garbage as well.

A_L is dead right re that old maxim. Unfortunately, Thatcher took no heed when deregulating the city & allowing poxy little building societies to become banks, hence the present financial crisis.

Ditto Tony with the Civil Service & obsessiveness with learning from the private sector. Why?

All they can teach us is how to screw things up totally. And from my time at the CSA, we Civil Servants can do that very well already, thank you!

Maybe Joe Stalin had it right all along. Bet he'd have had a special Gulags section on FR if he'd run that!


Steve M

Off topic, but I am interested to note that Steve M shares my opinion of eBay's recent pressing of the self destruct button after a lengthy period of threatening this action.

As regards Friends Reunited, if the volume of emails pleading with me (and presumably with everyone else who stopped using the site) to return is anything to go by ITV must have known for some time that they'd blundered in the revamp. Steve is probably correct in instancing the advertisers as a significant influence in the removal of the CP references. School CP is not thought to be politically correct. However, those same advertisers don't hesitate to use any politically incorrect imagery that suits them if they think there's a fast buck in it. They simply miscalculated in the case of FR.

I should have added the self-interest re E-bay.

For about the last 9 months, you've been unable to leave negative feedback for buyers.

So, bidders/non-payers who fanny you about for 3 weeks & you lose the 2nd place bidders' interest, can't be tagged for the rest of us! I would personally prefer to exterminate them like the vermin they are, but being able to leave them negative feedback as jerks would probably suffice.

Equally, the fraud merchants can still get away with it. Build up their feedback by buying cheap stuff in bulk & paying for it promptly, then sell it quickly & get further good feed back in bulk to hide the purchases a few pages back.

And THEN start selling the fake Amani suits etc, taking the money and running. There's nothing in their re-jig I can see to combat that classic scam that's always given the rest of us a bad name.

I know there's a recession allegedly on, but I personally prefer not to cater to the lowest common denominator, which is why I will never enter the doors of Asda or Lidl!

Wonder if Michael Grade suffered CP or ragging at school, by the way?!

Now, rant over-time for a dodgy video-not the music & it won't get the forum closed. Just too good to miss-typical 1987 stuff!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcXnebH_muA


Steve M

ITV is sadly the 13 independant regions now owned by just two pratts combined Granda (motorway cafes and bingo halls) and Carlton (communications co) who with Granda stole LWT closed Central and produce and show little

Grade is a twat he was good at LWT and Ch4 he is piss poor at the ITV Brand


CP is important and our chav lads need it bring back national service and slipperings in the gym and guard room>>> that's the ticket