This morning I had a sniff round the new version of ‘Friends Reunited‘, I’ve been meaning to do so since its relaunch in March.

Friends Reunited was set up in 1999 in the UK by a couple of people who saw a market in reconnecting people who went to school together. They worked tirelessly to put the site together, and chose a subscription model to establish, maintain and progress the site.

Initially it was £5 a year to join, and for the fiver users were then able to list themselves next to their school name and send messages to old friends also listed on the site.

I joined the site in 2001, and got in touch with a couple of old friends, was a great little service… it was great to see what old friends were up to. When the membership fee rose to £7.50 I decided not to pay it, as I’d been in touch with those that I wanted to talk to and nolonger needed to be a paying member…. and Friends Reunited never worked properly on an Apple Mac anyway.

In 2005 ITV bought Friends Reunited for £120m, just before Myspace and Facebook started to take over the world with its free alternative social networking site. These sites were free to join, and paid for by advertising revenues.

I joined Facebook in 2006, with more and more of my friends (from all over the world) joining Facebook it became pointless to log in to Friends Reunited.

So this morning I revisited Friends Reunited for the first time since the relaunch and found it surprisingly refreshing. The new homepage is easy to navigate and simple on the eye, better than the cluttered mess it used to be! But once logged in after watching the introduction video with Martin Clunes voiceover I became unimpressed. All the data in my ‘timeline’ was incorrect, I struggled to navigate to find friends and wondered why I had to click ‘My profile’ followed by ‘My profile’ to get to my profile. I went into a group called ‘Ultralab’ which I’d previously joined (a few years back) within Friends Reunited and came across a list of people I once worked with. I clicked ‘add to friend list’ on one of my old colleagues and Friends Reunited then asked me how I knew the person, and where we worked together? I had to click ‘Ultralab’ again, why? I’m already in that group.

I’ve found Friends Reunited painfully slow to load and confusing this morning, and think they were an early pioneer in connecting people back together, but totally missed the ’social networking’ element as it came along, and are now a little too late and I think should really concentrate on linking people up with their old school mates, for free. Still 100 times better than Yuwie though!

Some things don’t change:

This afternoon I signed up (only) to have a sniff around Yuwie, a new social networking website which claims to pay people who use its service, by giving users a cut of the advertising revenue depending on how many times their ’stuff’ gets looked at.

I’m an avid user of facebook to keep in touch and share stuff with friends and family. Prior to facebook I had a playaround with myspace but prefered Facebook for its ease of use and third party product integration. Then, of course, there is bebo, which, like myspace, is very popular in schools. So with people already in ‘facebook’, ‘myspace’ and ‘bebo’ …. why would they then join Yuwie and encourage all their friends and family to abandon the social site they already belong to and join them at Yuwie? Money.

But….I think Yuwie is too late to the table when it comes to the social networking sites. The site seems to be swamped with people who are intent on making money from it, piling in as much content as they can to get ‘views’. Now when (for example) I upload images and video’s to facebook, I’ll upload the ones I consider ‘the best ones’, knowing my friends and family will not want to wade through massive photo albums……. In Yuwie users seem to be uploading as much as possible, so along come the massive albums and very very short video clips, therefore encouraging lots and lots of views on their stuff. How can that be good? As a user I’ll be wading though tons of images friends have uploaded, wasting time looking at the blury ones and the ones with peoples heads missing knowing that the person the image belongs to is being paid for me to look at their quite frankly shoddy images….. because the more ‘hits’ they get on their stuff, the more they get paid.

Pages of content take quite some time to load, which can mean one of two things:

• it is very busy
• the servers are slow

To be honest, I’m not convinced by it, but go and have a look yourself. I think two things:

• it is too late to market
• looking at the name and logo, its as if all they are trying to do is get bought by Yahoo!

UPDATE: Friday 22 March

Today I deleted the test Yuwie account I had set up to play with. These are the reasons:

• I’d apparently been signed up through a referral by someone else…… which means the person who had suggested I try Yuwie (in a discussion in Facebook) was profiting from me becoming his friend on the site.
• In social networking sites I prefer to have listed on my ‘friends list’ as the people I actually know….. and was unable to delete my ’so called’ friend from my buddy list. He calls himself ‘my upline’ and has over 2000 friends on Yuwie.
• I got a message on my wall from ‘upline’ saying “make sure you leave messages on new friends walls to keep active”. He started sending me regular emails instructing me where to go and what to do to create maximum activity (and therefore more revenue for him, and me!).
• I got 14 emails on average a day from ‘upline’ asking me to add specific people to my buddy list (who I have no idea who they actually are).
• Other complete strangers started asking to me by friend, by email. I’m guessing the only reason they want to be my friend is to increase activity and increase the amount of money they make.
• The interface for Yuwie is quite simply rubbish, and for a social site boasting nearly half a million members you don’t expect to see SQL errors all over the page.
• The site is flooded with advertising for ‘young hotties’ and ‘you have won a free laptop - claim now’ and ‘you are the 999,999,999 visitor *no joke* claim your Audi A3 here’….

After sniffing about looking at ‘upline’ I see he is obsessed with getting as many people into Yuwie as possible, no matter if he knows them or not purely to increase his income. He shares his Yuwie finance figures in a blog post and is praised by other Yuwie members for his successes ($12 total in January, $7 total in December) ?????? Is it really worth all the effort?

I’m appauled with my brief experience with Yuwie. My experience with it was a place where people are simply there to make money, rather than ’social network’ for social reasons. What I can’t believe is just how little money these people are making for sending out messages and encouraging more and more complete strangers to join their networks. How could this model ever be successful?