David McManus takes a look at the history of a once-popular website

Difficult though it is to believe, there was once a world where the phrase ‘social media’ would at best describe the reading material at a village hall book club.

Into this world still nursing a collective hangover from the millennium celebrations a few months earlier was born Friends Reunited, the brainchild of a Hertfordshire couple reminiscing over what became of old school pals. This week sees the news that the once huge website has announced its imminent closure, so let us take a look at its history.

A book or film must surely be in the offing. The middle months of 2000 are when we now consider the first dot-com bubble burst. This was an era where a website selling pet food burned through a $300 million investment before barely selling a dog biscuit and a new clothing site spent vast sums developing an innovative dress-up virtual mannequin that literally no computer outside of Nasa had the power or bandwidth to run.

The absurd excesses and spectacular collapse of the likes of pets.com and boo.com are now part of Internet folklore, but just as that first wave of online businesses were finally realising the emperor was actually naked, Steve and Julie Pankhurst, of Barnet, introduced the result of six months grafting away at their home computer.

Doing exactly what it said on the tin, Friends Reunited offered its subscribers the chance to once again make contact with long lost chums, with an emphasis heavily based around the traditional school reunion. By the end of 2000, the site had managed to attract 3,000 members, giving the Pankhursts a distinct impression that they might be on to something.

Twelve months later, with the advantage of an intrigued press that gave the site plenty of free publicity, its user base had rocketed to two million. Clearly this desire for nostalgia was no passing fad.

I had a brief affair with Friends Reunited back in its fledgling days. I was initially drawn by the intrigue of discovering what became of the old school gang until I quickly realised that throughout secondary school my inseparable group of four friends was still regularly in touch, despite two of them being at opposite sides of the globe, and I never really cared about anyone else, even when I was packed into classrooms with them.

When I did search out my alma mater and finally remember the year I left, I was met by a triple whammy of disappointment. Of the three people already registered, two were names I could not recollect and the third was the school bully. Even had I some perverse desire to contact them, Friends Reunited wanted £5 from me in order to reveal an email address and I was not about to part with even five pence for such a privilege.

Its rising membership drew the attention of ITV chairman Michael Grade who persuaded his bosses to part with £120 million to buy it in 2005. In 2007, Facebook’s traffic increased by 2000% compared to the 1% growth of Friends Reunited.

Two years later, ITV dumped it at a loss of £100 million. Grade realised he wasn’t a web entrepreneur after all and the countdown clock began ticking.