Reading (U1/Int.)

Internet sites such as Friends Reunited in the UK and Classmates.com in the US are extremely popular. Friends Reunited launched in July 2000 and now has millions of people registered.

The website was the idea of Steve Pankhurst and his wife Julie. At the time they were expecting their first child and Julie was interested in finding out whether her school friends were also married and had families.

So, the main idea was simply to find a way in which old school friends who had lost touch with each other could be reunited. Now thousands of people are doing this through the website, where they can write their own profile and view profiles of their old school friends.

There are a lot of happy stories of friends who had gone their separate ways after leaving school and had lost touch, but who have now become friends again after contacting each other through the website.

However not everything about these websites is positive. Firstly, there is no way in which a lot of the information can be checked, so it is quite possible that people write things about themselves which simply aren’t true.

The websites have also been blamed for a number of marriage breakups – a result of old school couples getting back together!