Friends Reunited grew out of a great idea in 1999. From Wikipedia:

“The main Friends Reunited site aims to reunite people who have in common a school, university, address, workplace, sports club or armed service; the sister site Genes Reunited enables members to pool their family trees and identify common ancestors; the Dating and Jobs sister sites link members with similar attributes, interests and/or locations.”

It was a good idea. It’s also a good example of how to kill a brilliant concept.

I joined Friends Reunited many years ago, and initially found it an easy way of contacting old friends. Then the service started getting greedy, and their free service became little more than an irritating push towards their paid subscription. If my memory serves me correctly, there was a time that you actually had to pay to contact a friend.

Today they’ve learnt from their mistakes, and when I click on the name of a girl I knew when I was seven years old, I can “Send a message to Justine – it’s completely free!”.

I can also do it for free here: Hello Justine Sullivan from King David, Manchester.

Far too little. Far too late.

The Twitter, YouTube and Facebook models gave their users an astonishing number of features for free. This helped them gain enormous popularity, and contributed to their becoming household names.

Friends Reunited, on the other hand, was poorly implemented and left to slowly decay. The result? ITV paid £175 million ($287 million) in 2005, then sold it for £25 million ($41 million) only four years later.

Not exactly a good investment.

If good ideas aren’t nourished, they’ll wither and die. Keep up, keep ahead, be seen, be sold.