Friends Reunited losing older members “by the day” following radical rebrand
Silver surfers said to be turning their backs on the UK’s original networking site in protest about the closure of its “senior-friendly” forums.
Friends Reunited is losing older members “by the day” as a result of its radical rebrand, it emerged yesterday.
Silver surfers are said to be turning their backs on the UK’s original networking site in protest about the closure of its “senior-friendly” forums.
The thriving chatrooms enabled members to socialise in real time, and acted as a “vital communication link” for many web-savvy OAPs.
But the decision by Friends Reunited to relaunch as a “share the memories” service – and to shut its forums in the process - has caused an “exodus” of members in their 50s, 60s and 70s, it is claimed.
They are now migrating to other networking websites, which have been quick to capitalise on the situation by opening anti-sleaze, OAP-friendly forums.
Carolyn Morris, from www.alljoinon.com, has seen a 75% increase in older members - the majority, she says, are former Friends Reunited stalwarts.
She said: “I visited Friends Reunited on its last day before the relaunch and many of the older members were almost in tears.
“The site’s once-thriving over-50 community was worried about how they were going to keep in touch with their friends.
“I set up AllJoinOn to provide a family-friendly environment to socialise and make new friends so I invited them to try the site. We've had so much traffic as a result that I've had to get a new server to cope with it all.”
Friends Reunited was the UK's first social networking site, which generated over 20million members at its height.
But the emergence of more technologically-advanced rivals such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter left it struggling to maintain its user base.
It was bought by ITV for £175m in 2005 only to be sold on for £25.6m four years later to online publishing group Brightsolid, part of the Dundee-based Beano publisher DC Thomson.
Prior to its relaunch on March 27, Friends Reunited was attracting just 1.5m unique visitors per month.
Now its owners are now aiming to turn the site's fortunes around by reinventing it as an online destination for nostalgia and sharing memories, similar to Tumblr and Pinterest.
Morris, from alljoinon.com, however, claims the change in focus has “backfired”. She claims many now regard themselves as ‘Friends Reunited refugees’ and ‘dispossessed souls’.
“The refocus as a sharing site would usually appeal to the core 16 to 25-year-old audiences who drive technology and new ideas forward,” she said.
“But at the same time, these key users are too young for a 'memories' site and the traditional Friends Reunited user base is typically older and therefore unlikely to have the same desire to share every minute detail of their life online.
“The consensus view from the hundreds of former Friends Reunited members who have joined AllJoinOn in the last week is that they simply want a smut-free online home to meet up and chat with old chums.”
ENDS
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