FriendsReunited is worth about as much as RMS Titanic shortly after it hit the iceberg.
It doesn’t matter how big or fancy your ship is – or how many souls there are on board. If it’s sinking, it’s worth nothing in a financial sense. You can’t do anything with it except watch with grim fascination as it slips beneath the waves.
But there is a lot to be learned about social media from its demise.
FriendsReunited started with a great idea – to use the web to reconnect people with other people. Nothing wrong in that – it’s what people want to spend all day doing, given half a chance. So where did it go wrong? Two big – simple – mistakes.
1) Horrible, clunky, counterintuitive and frustrating user interface. Yes. It was an awful experience. Whenever I used it, I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. The site developers couldn’t see past their own thought-processes. Full steam ahead, no matter what was happening around it.
2) Even the free membership wasn’t worth the effort, so there was no chance for those poor people in First Class. Ok, that’s stretching the Titanic analogy a bit but developers beware. If you’re trying to charge for what other people do better for free, you’re history.
Meanwhile, expect to see the social media war become anything but social over the next couple of years as the big players seek to herd all the people in the world on board a single, um, unsinkable network. 
