Websites that changed the world | Technology | The Guardian The Observer Websites that changed the world Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here, the Observer's Net specialist charts the web's remarkable early life and we tell the story of the 15 most influential websites to date. Tell us what you think of our choices here Share on Messenger Close Johannes Gutenberg took the idea of printing by moveable type and turned it into a publishing system. In doing so he changed the world. But he did not live to see the extent of the revolution he had brought about. If you'd told him in 1468 - the year he died - that the Bible he had published in 1455 would undermine the authority of the Catholic church, power the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, create new social classes and even change our concept of childhood, he would have looked at you blankly.

But there lives among us today a man who has done something similar, and survived to see the fruits of his work. He is Tim Berners-Lee, and he conceived a system for turning the internet into a publishing medium. Just over 15 years ago - on 6 August 1991, to be precise - he released the code for his invention on to the internet. He called it the World Wide Web, and had the inspired idea that it should be free so that anyone could use it. And just about everyone did, with the result that the web grew exponentially. Today nobody really knows how big it is. At a recent conference, Yahoo's head of research and development put the size of the public web at 40 billion pages, but the size of the 'deep' web, the area where web pages are assembled on the fly and served up in response to clicked-upon links, is estimated to be between 400 and 750 times greater than the part that is indexed by search engines. Since you started reading this piece, thousands of pages have been added. By any standards, the web represents a colossal change in our information environment.

And the strange thing is that it has come about in just 15 years. Actually, most of it has happened in less than that, because the web only went mainstream in 1993, when the first graphical browsers - the computer programs we use to access the web - were released. So these are early days. We can no more envisage the long-term implications of what has happened than dear old Gutenberg could. The strangest thing is how casually we have come to take it for granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Easyjet and Ryanair, tickets for theatres and cinemas online, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. We check the opening times at the Louvre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or browse their collections) online. We check definitions (and spellings) in online dictionaries, look up stuff in Wikipedia, search for apartments to rent on Craigslist or a host of local lookalikes such as Daft.ie in Ireland. You can buy and sell just about anything (excluding body parts) on eBay. Children seeking pictures for school projects search for them on Google Images (and download them without undue concern for intellectual property rights).

Holiday snaps escape from their shoeboxes and are published to the world on Flickr. Home movies likewise on YouTube. And of course anyone with doubts about a prospective blind date can do an exploratory check on Google before committing to an evening out with a total stranger. All this we now take for granted. To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago. Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver's Travels. A googol was a very large number (one followed by a hundred zeroes). Classified ads were densely printed matter in newspapers. 'Encyclopedia' was a synonym for Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted to read what your MP had said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little shops in high streets called 'travel agents'. To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the web we've assembled a list of sites that have become the virtual wallpaper of our lives.

What the corresponding list will be like in 15 years' time is anyone's guess. As the man said, if you want to know the future, go buy a crystal ball. In the meantime, read on and wonder. · John Naughton's history of the internet, A Brief History of the Future, is published by Phoenix at £7.99 1. eBay.com Founded: Pierre Omidyar, 1995, US Users: 168m What is it? Auction and shopping site You cannot buy fireworks, guns, franking machines, animals or lock-picking devices on eBay, the internet's premier auction site, but almost everything else is OK: sideburns, houses, used underwear and of course Pez dispensers. Pez is where it is said to have all begun for eBay's ponytailed founder Pierre Omidyar when he responded to his fiancee's worries that she would no longer be able to expand her toy collection when they moved to Silicon Valley. Omidyar developed a car boot sale anyone could use wherever they were, and without the need for getting dressed.

The name sprang from Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consultancy company, and the first sale was a broken laser pointer. Things have moved on a little since then. We spend more time on eBay than any other internet site. There are more than 10 million users in the UK. And eBay is far from just a second-hand stall. New items are sold by global companies; many people have abandoned their jobs to eBay full time, and normally sane people fret about 'negative feedback' and being outbid by 'snipers'. eBay owns PayPal and Skype, making dealing almost effortless. Simon Garfield Founded: Jimmy Wales, 2001, US Users: 912,000 visits per day What is it? Online encyclopaedia As a young boy growing up in Hunstville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales attended a one-room school, sharing his classes with only three other children. Here he spent 'many hours poring over encyclopaedias', and faced the familiar frustrations: their scope was conservative; they were hard to navigate and often out of date. In January 2001 he created a solution.

Wikipedia was a free online encyclopaedia and differed from its predecessors in one fundamental regard: it was open to everyone to read, and also to edit. If you had something to add - from a pedantic correction to an entire entry on your specialist subject - the Wiki template made this easy. The software enables entries to be updated within minutes of new developments. There is nothing you cannot find - how best to make glass, the use of the nappy in space exploration - and if something isn't there, you may wish to take matters into your own hands. Like any fast-moving venture - the site attracts 2,000-plus page requests a second - it has not been slow to attract criticism. Occasionally a libellous article will lie undetected for months, as happened with an entry linking one of Robert Kennedy's aides with his assassination. But Wales says his creation is abused only rarely, and swiftly corrected by other users. 'Those who use Wikipedia a lot appreciate its true value and have learnt to trust it,' he says.

'Sometimes a prankster will substitute a picture of Hitler for George Bush, and within an hour someone would have changed it back.' SG Founded: Shawn Fanning, 1999, US Users: 500,000 paying subscribers What is it? File sharing site Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1999 while studying at Boston's Northeastern University, as a means of sharing music files with his fellow students. Of course, it was entirely illegal (home taping kills music, remember) and was quickly attacked by a mainstream music industry already struggling to make profits on its money-guzzling artists. Its popularity reached a peak in 2000 with over 70 million registered users before Fanning's company was forced to pay millions of dollars in backdated royalties: a move which bankrupted the original, free-to-use Napster the following year. By then, however, the premature leaking and sharing of hotly anticipated albums by some of the major labels' most bankable artists had proved to be a stimulant, not a thief, of sales once the CD version was released.

The new Napster - effectively a renamed version of a pay-to-download MP3 site owned by the original Napster company's buyers, the German giant Bertelsmann- has never recaptured its original cool, precisely because it is now legitimate. What it did in its brief period of illegal notoriety was popularise the notion that making music freely available on the internet - through MySpace, one-off downloads or artist-sanctioned 'leaks' - does artists no harm at all; indeed, it's helped to launch the careers of many. Lynsey Hanley Founded: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, 2005, US Users: 100m clips watched a day What is it? Video sharing site When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen began working out of a garage in San Mateo in late 2004 to figure out an easy way to upload and share funny videos they'd taken at a dinner party, they had no idea just how huge an impact their creation would make.

The former PayPal employees launched the user-friendly site in February 2005 and it has since become one of the most popular sites on the net, with YouTube claiming that 100 million clips are watched every day. Through the grassroots power of the internet and good word-of-mouth, the site quickly went from a place where people shared homemade video clips to users posting long-lost TV and film gems such as bloopers from Seventies game shows to ancient music videos. It has also taken off as a place for amateur film-makers to show off their talents - take David Lehre, a teenager whose MySpace: The Movie became such a popular clip he's already fielded job offers from major movie studios. Not all television studios immediately embraced the idea of their archived copyrighted footage being shared. 'We're not here to steal,' insists Chen. 'When [US television network] NBC asked us to take something down, we did.' In fact, NBC only last week announced plans to work alongside YouTube, airing exclusive clips and trailers and eventually hoping to post episodes of The Office and Saturday Night Live on it. The company has had several offers to be bought out, but the pair swear they will not sell out.

They continue to work out of their San Mateo loft, overseeing 27 employees and developing ways to make the site easier to use while whirling lucrative deals with studios. Gillian Telling Founded: Evan Williams, 1999, US Users: 18.5m unique visitors What is it? Weblog publishing system There weren't too many computers lying around in the cornfields of Nebraska in the 1970s when Evan Williams was growing up. But he was drawn to them when he found them. He was also drawn west, to California in the 1990s. Williams founded Pyra Labs with two friends. At first it made project-management software for companies. It was not glamorous. Then it made Blogger and changed the world. 'The funny thing was I actually hesitated before working on Blogger because I didn't see the commercial applications,' says Williams. 'We had started a company and we needed to make money. We didn't see how this little hobbyist activity was going to make anyone money.' The little hobbyist activity was blogging, the art of keeping a weblog - of diarising, theorising, satirising, fictionalising your life and observations online.

It had already taken off among the tech fraternity in the Nineties, but it required building and maintaining your own website; the luddites were excluded. Williams created a tool that made self-publishing online as user-friendly as word-processing. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this innovation. It didn't just create a new form of creative expression, it turned the media upside down. Content was once made by companies for passive consumption by people. After Blogger, people were the content. They wrote about and read about their friends, their opinions, their cats. (There was a lot about cats in the early blogs.) None had a huge audience but collectively they were massive. 'Now you see TV networks saying: "We've gotta get on the web because that's where the audience is,"' says Williams. There is no accurate count of the number of blogs in existence now. There are millions. One is created every minute. The revolution might have been possible without Blogger but it would have taken everyone a lot longer. 'Something like it would have existed anyway,' says Williams. 'And lots of things like it do exist.

It was a combination of helping push an idea as well as just being in the right place at the right time when the idea was right.' Rafael Behr Founded: Steve and Julie Pankhurst, 1999, UK Users: 15m What is it? School reunion site In July 2000, as the dreams of the internet boom crumbled around them, a husband-and-wife team were busy launching a rough and ready web phenomenon. Friends Reunited, which was sold to ITV for £120m last December, was Julie Pankhurst's brainchild. While pregnant, she became obsessed with finding out what her old friends had been up to since they left school. Her husband Steve, a computer programmer, had been brainstorming with his business partner Jason Porter for an original internet-based idea, and Julie suggested a website to cater for her newfound obsession. It took her some time to convince them. 'In the end,' says Steve, 'I designed Friends Reunited just to shut her up.' The site took off slowly, getting half a dozen hits per day, but everything changed at the start of 2001 when its lone server collapsed.

'The Steve Wright show on Radio 2 had made us their website of the day. Tens of thousands of people had tried to access the site at the same time.' Within a month membership rose from 3,000 to 19,000; the couple were working 18-hour days. Friends Reunited quickly became a household name and membership soared into the millions. Killian Fox Founded: Matt Drudge, 1994, US Users: 8-10m page views per day What is it? News site What began as a gossipy email newsletter has, since its first post in 1994, developed into one of the most powerful media outlets in American politics. Today the Drudge Report has evolved into a website, drudgereport.com, and its threadbare, no-frills design belies the scale of its influence. It received an estimated 3.5 billion hits in the last 12 months; visitors regard it as the first port of call for breaking news. Fedora-wearing founder Matt Drudge monitors TV and the internet for rumours and stories which he posts as headlines on his site.

For the most part these are direct links to traditional news sites, though occasionally Drudge writes the stories himself. In 1998 he was the first to break news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Named this year as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, the 38-year-old regards himself as a maverick newsman working free from the demands of editors and advertisers. Others, particularly critics from the left, view his reportage as biased towards conservatives, careless, malicious and frequently prone to error. A report in 1997, alleging that White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal physically abused his wife, generated a $30m lawsuit against Drudge, which was dropped in 2001. In June 2004, Drudge apologised for a February 'world exclusive' claiming that John Kerry had had an affair with an intern. Drudge has been labelled a 'threat to democracy' and an 'idiot with a modem' as well as 'the kind of bold, entrepreneurial, free-wheeling, information-oriented outsider we need more of in this country' (by Camille Paglia); his importance in the US media is undisputed.

KF Founded: Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, 2003, US Users: 100m What is it? Social networking site When business-school alumnus Chris DeWolfe set up the social networking site MySpace with his partner, ex-band member and film studies graduate Tom Anderson, three years ago, there was little indication that the one-stop online friend-making shop would soon boast 100 million members and more page visits in Britain than the BBC. The pair envisaged a site that would bring together all the qualities of existing online communities such as Friendster, Tribe.net and LiveJournal, with added features including classified adverts and events planning. They got the formula just right: the MySpace-opolis is growing by 240,000 a day, making it the fourth most-visited website in the world. DeWolfe believes that the key to the site's success is its founders' rapport with the people who use it. 'We looked at it from the point of view of how people live their lives,' he says.

One of those features is the ability to upload and listen to music, which has attracted 2.2 million new bands and artists to the site, some of whom - most famously Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys - can attribute their chart success to having spread the word through MySpace. MySpace's parent company, Intermix, was bought by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp last year for $580m, causing consternation among some of the music world's more politicised acts, but no large-scale boycott. The site is simply too valuable and effective - and ubiquitous - to ignore. LH Founded: Jeff Bezos, 1994, US Users: More than 35m customers in over 250 countries What is it? Online retailer, primarily of books, CDs and DVDs The earth's biggest bookstore was originally called Cadabra, but Jeff Bezos thought again after his lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'. He chose Amazon as something large and unstoppable and so, with current annual revenues of $8bn, it has proved. It was just a trickle to begin with though: the first office was in a Seattle suburb with desks made out of old doors.

But it quickly became the headline act of the dotcom miracle and Bezos was Time magazine's man of the year in 1999. Amazon's continued dominance rests on price-slashing that would make Wal-Mart wince, and a reputation for reliability. Though selling books (and now almost everything else) on a vast scale, it has tried never to forget the value of intimacy. Tim Adams Founded: Rob Malda, 1997, US Users: 5.5m per month What is it? Technology news website and internet forum 'I'm just a geek that likes to poke around with hardware,' says Rob Malda. His site, Slashdot.org, hosts news and discussion for techies and is one of the most visited websites in the world. Time magazine included him in its top 100 innovators, stating: 'Malda has taken the idea of what news can be, hacked it open and rebuilt it for the internet age.' Most of the site is written by users; posts include a short synopsis paragraph, a link to the original story and a lengthy discussion sometimes running to 10,000 comments a day.

Slashdot pioneered this user-driven content, and influenced sites including Google News, Guardian Unlimited and Wikipedia. In 2002 the site leaked the ruling of a court case involving Microsoft before the verdict had even been delivered to Microsoft or the US government. There is also the Slashdot effect, where a site is swamped by heavy traffic from a Slashdot link and its server collapses. In 1997, 21-year-old Malda started what we would now call a blog, hosted on his user account at university. As the site picked up users he divided his time between college, paid work and the site. 'It was a blur. There were many nights when I did not sleep.' Two years later Andover bought Slashdot for $5m, shared between Malda, co-founder Jeff 'Hemos' Bates and other partners. They also shared $7m in stock between them. In 2000 VA Linux (now VA Software) bought Andover for $900m. Slashdot now has 10 employees dedicated to maintaining the site, most of them based in California. Malda has remained in Michigan, where he grew up and went to college. He is director of Slashdot.

He proposed to his wife Kathleen on the site in 2002. Katie Toms Founded: David Talbot, 1995, US Users: Between 2.5 and 3.5m unique visitors per month What is it? Online magazine and media company Salon grew out of a strike. When the San Francisco Examiner was shut for a couple of weeks in 1994 a few of its journalists taught themselves HTML and had a go at doing a newspaper with new technology. They found the experience liberating, and David Talbot, the Examiner's arts editor, subsequently gave up his job and launched the kind of online paper he had always wanted to work for. Salon was originally a forum for discussing books, but the editors quickly realised it had to be more journalistic than that. They aimed at creating a 'smart tabloid', not afraid to be mischievous while maintaining a rigour with news. Talbot believes that online journalism came of age with the death of Princess Diana and the Lewinsky scandal. It proved with those events that it could be nimbler and more gossipy, it could update itself continually and, crucially, let readers join in.

Salon's Table Talk forum established a new relationship between a news outfit and its audience, letting readers write themselves into the story. Salon was not afraid of muck-raking. When Talbot decided to run a story about Henry Hyde, who was to sit in judgment of Bill Clinton after the Starr report, he was roundly criticised not just by the entrenched Washington media but also by some on his own staff. The story concerned Hyde's extramarital affair of 30 years before, and the more august sections of the American media, not to mention the right-wing impeachers of the President, thought this was beyond the pale. Talbot recalls how Salon 'got bomb threats, I received death threats... [but] I think if as a new organisation that comes into the world, a new media operation, you don't take risks with stories that no one else does, then what's the point?' For all its journalistic success, Salon has always struggled financially. A couple of times the site has nearly gone under; on one occasion Talbot was forced to fire his wife who ran a women's page. A subscription system saved it, along with the growth in online advertising.

These days Talbot sees Salon's competitors as the big news organisations, the New York Times and so on, who have strong online presence. Having shown a few of them how it's done, Salon now faces a daily battle to stay ahead of the game. TA Founded: Craig Newmark, 1995, US Users: 4bn page views per month What is it? A centralised network of online urban communities, featuring free classified advertisements and forums Craigslist is one of the most deceptively simple websites on the internet. It is also one of the most powerful. It is - pretty much - simply a free noticeboard. But its astonishing popularity has given it immense power. Want to rent an apartment? Sell a car? Find a job? Meet someone to spend the night with? Craiglist will provide the answers. For free. It has revolutionised urban living in America. It has also undercut one of the main reasons for newspapers: classified advertising. As nearly all Craigslist's content is free, it rarely censors ads and its readers number in the millions, it is far more useful to post an advert on the site than in your local newspaper.

Thus a huge decline in newspaper ads and revenue, triggering cost-cutting which will see reporters tossed on to the scrap heap... and the end of a free press and democracy as we know it (if the critics are to be believed). The website was founded by Craig Newmark, an ubergeek with a hippyish mentality. It started as a simple email that he would send around listing various events going on in San Francisco. From such humble beginnings Craigslist has grown into a multi-million-dollar business. Yet Newmark refuses to sell his company or charge for every ad. Why should you care? Craigslist is all over the world - and coming to your home town soon. Paul Harris Founded: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1998, US Users: A billion search requests per day What is it? Search engine and media corporation Its name is listed as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. It commands the largest internet search engine in the world. It is the fastest-growing company in history and its founders are worth almost $13bn each. The search method devised by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was instrumental to Goggle's success.

Rather than ranking results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page, their system measured the frequency with which a website was referenced by other sites. Another key factor was the site's stripped-down design, which made it speedier and more accessible than its competitors. From such plain foundations a gigantic empire has sprung and is branching out into email (with Gmail), news (Google News), price comparison (Froogle), cartography (Google Maps), literature (with the much contested Google Book Search), free telephony (Google Talk), and, most strikingly, Google Earth, an incredibly detailed virtual globe. Google styles itself as a laidback, hippyish organisation but its founding motto, 'Don't Be Evil', is already being tested: the compromise it reached with China over censorship has proved particularly contentious. KF Founded: David Filo and JerryYang, 1994, US Users: 400m What is it? Internet portal and media corporation It receives an average of 3.4bn page hits a day, making it the single most visited website on the internet, but in recent years Yahoo! has been eclipsed by Google.

Both companies were launched on a very small scale by Stanford University graduates and, very soon the portal that Jerry Yang and David Filo had started as a hobby was en route to becoming the most popular search engine on the web. On the back of its early success, Yahoo! (an acronym for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle') branched out into email, instant messaging, news, gaming, online shopping and an array of other services. It also started buying up other companies such as Geocities, eGroups and the web radio company Broadcast.com. Yahoo! survived the internet collapse at the start of the decade and brought former Warner Bros chief exec Terry Semel on board in 2001 to navigate the difficult waters of the post-boom period. Semel began to address the challenge of making money out of the internet without relying on advertising revenue alone. Google notwithstanding, Yahoo! is still very much a contender. KF Users: 30m passengers last year What is it?: Budget airline It's easy to forget what it was like back in the old days, when we didn't just pay a tenner, pitch up at Luton and pop over to Rome for the weekend. We mini-breaked in Bournemouth.

Travelling to Scotland was an all-day affair. Airlines issued quaint old-fashioned things such as meals. And tickets. And seats. And then along came Stelios. That's Stelios as in Haji-Ioannou, although he now, alongside Delia and Jamie and Sven, belongs in that rare category - the surnameless celebrity. He's also that other elusive British beast - the celebrity entrepreneur. In 1995, after borrowing £30m from his dad, a shipping magnate, he leased two second-hand Boeings and began selling flights to Scotland for £29 each way. EasyJet was the first low-cost British airline and, presciently, the first to start taking bookings over the internet, although, as Stelios admits, he wasn't won over straight away. 'We started off as something very obscure like 1145678.com. And I said: "This is never going to fill the planes. It's just for nerds." Then some time in 1997 we bought the domain easyjet.com for about £1,000 and put up a proper website.

At that time we had the telephone number in big letters on the side of the plane. And we put a different telephone number on the website. Week after week I watched how quickly the numbers were growing and that gave me the confidence in April 1997 to launch a booking site.' It was, he says, the neatest and simplest way: 'you outsource the work to the customer'. And it turned him into an internet evangelical. The first company he set up after easyJet was easyInternetcafe and all 15 companies in the easyGroup have some sort of web component. Carole Cadwalladr Steve Pankhurst: Happy to be the Victor Meldrew of technology | The Independent Profiles Steve Pankhurst: Happy to be the Victor Meldrew of technology As Friends Reunited undergoes yet another reincarnation, its reclusive multimillionaire founder says he's delighted to have got out.

Kunal Dutta meets Steve Pankhurst Sunday 25 March 2012 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online A Geek's Geek: Steve Pankhurst, who founded Friends Reunited, near his home last week Jason Alden When Steve Pankhurst was setting up Friends Reunited in 1999, Mark Zuckerberg was still an anonymous geek rattling around a boarding school in New Hampshire. At separate times they have both been lauded as titans of social networking. But while Zuckerberg went on to set up Facebook, wealth beyond avarice and public egomania, Pankhurst grabbed the money and ran. He's still running. While, superficially, he has changed little since he became one of the first dotcom millionaires, the experience has clearly left its mark. True, he's still married to the same woman – unlike his former business partner who made tabloid headlines after a very public divorce and loss of fortune, all played out in a series of lurid headlines. But he still has most of his dotcom windfall. He insists he is cautious, community-spirited and – beyond investing – has little to spend money on.

Yet he has no full-time job or business – and even the thriftiest might raise an eyebrow at the fact that he still has the car he bought as a luxury when he first made his millions: a Volkswagen Golf. If Zuckerberg is the ultimate über-geek, then Pankhurst is his mirror image: the unter-nerd, having retreated from the world and with no desire to engage with it any time soon. His reaction when our photographer pitches up to take his picture is close to panic: "I'm not doing this again! I have deliberately hidden away from all this for six years and I don't want to turn this tap on again now. If this article never sees the light of day, I really won't mind." He still seems to view his success as some kind of ghastly accident. A freelance computer programmer, he built a site for his pregnant wife to keep in touch with her friends because she was housebound and feeling isolated. But Friends Reunited struck a chord, gaining more than 15 million members; by 2005, it was sold to ITV for a total of £175m, netting him £30m.

The sale still commands a place in the pantheon of the most ill-judged media deals in history, as it was sold some four years later for a fraction of the price. Despite his windfall, Pankhurst complains that he was "burnt out" by his time at Friends Reunited: "The press built us up to be this fantastic British company. Then all of a sudden we were being blamed for breaking up people's marriages. "There were loads of tales of spurned lovers and vitriolic break-ups. But the fact of the matter is we simply were not responsible for that. We provided a service in the same way that dating sites do; or how mobile phones do today. You can't blame the technology. Everyone has to be responsible for their own actions. If you're happily married and you look up someone from your past and get back together, that's your fault, not the service that provided that option." Then along came ITV to take all his problems off his hands and to replace them with more money than he could spend. Hard on its heels came Facebook, which rolled over Friends Reunited on its way to crush Myspace, Bebo and Friendster into kindling.

The Pankhursts can claim, without exaggeration, to have been unspoilt by fame and fortune. His children remain at the local comprehensive, and after we meet he takes the bus to the Tube station for an appointment with a charity project. What the couple have spent their money on is trading up from a terraced house in Barnet, north London, to a semi less than two miles away. And they invested, he says, in a range of stock options that has left him "safe for life". He has also travelled extensively, going on charity trips to Ghana, Peru, Vietnam and Mozambique in the past 15 months. Looking back on the years since the ITV buyout, he has blogged about himself: "The freedom of Doing Fuck All was the best environment to work in. The people around me, the wife, the kids and the cats were great – leaving me to dip into my creative side and fulfil my ambition of doing not a lot at all. There was no inner circle, no hierarchy, in fact absolutely Fuck All at all. Which meant the pressure to deliver was non-existent. The projects were innovative and exciting though – such as the School Run, Endless Lunches, Coastal Walks and Nights Out.

The opportunity for trips abroad with projects that stretched the boundaries ... were also legendary." "What money buys you more than anything else is time," he says during our talk. Yet it is not clear what he does with all the time he has bought. Of course, there are friends, family and taking the kids to school. More, he appears frozen in time: his jeans, patterned T-shirt and thin-framed black spectacles were standard uniform for media types at the turn of the century. Pressed, he insists his days are not empty. He recounts how the previous day he and a friend spent the day taking orders from his iPhone. Inspired by the 1971 book The Dice Man, they asked the phone what to do each time they had to make a decision. "We ended up asking people online what pint to drink, what shop to go in, what book to buy, what dog to put money on in the betting shop. It was an interesting social experiment." His brainchild will once again relaunch this week – with yet another new owner – this time, attempting to lure users with a "memory bank" that amounts to little more than freeze-dried nostalgia.

Users can share their memories of key cultural moments before the digital revolution, such as Live Aid 1985, and upload pictures, videos and thoughts. As with all other relaunches over the past six years, Pankhurst will not be involved, happy to sit on the sidelines. Asked how he would describe his position as the eminence grise of social networking, he offers a less glamorous alternative: the "Victor Meldrew of technology". More about: Friends Reunited has closed down: Founder Steve Pankhurst blames Facebook for 'sad decline' of website - Mirror Online News Friends Reunited has closed down: Founder Steve Pankhurst blames Facebook for 'sad decline' of website Service designed to help old friends stay in touch crumbles under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg's all-conquering social network Share Click to playTap to play The video will start in 8Cancel Play now Get daily updates directly to your inbox + Subscribe Thank you for subscribing! Could not subscribe, try again laterInvalid Email Friends Reunited has closed down after 15 years of helping old friends stay in touch over the internet.

People who are still on the site's mailing list were told about the closure today in an email from the original founder, who also penned a long and heartfelt essay about his creation. The website was considered to be one of the first social networks on the web, but simply couldn't compete with modern rivals. In a Medium post , founder Steve Pankhurst said the business "started to decline with the likes of Facebook taking over social networking". His announcement was met with sadness on social media, with some loyal users describing it as "the end of an era". "It hasn’t covered its costs and like any business this can’t continue indefinitely," Pankhurst continued. "Therefore, whilst it’s sad, I believe it’s time to move on and put Friends Reunited to bed. "And I feel like I am the right person to do it." Did you reconnect with someone special using Friends Reunited? Let us know using the form at the bottom of this article or email yourmirror@mirror.co.uk Read more : Shocking Facebook video shows young child driving truck down motorway Pankhurst is now working on a website called Liife, which allows people to chart their life in words and images.

He took the chance to have another dig at Facebook, saying that Liife would only allow people to share memories with people who want them. "One of my biggest gripes with Facebook are the times people tag or share photos of you and everyone sees them," he said. "And I too don't want to see everyone else’s group party shots. Plus the fact that they are lost in a mass of vacuous information. "Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is fantastic for lots of things and keeping in touch, but as a tool to plot my life its rather cumbersome." Pankhurst founded the website back in 1999, when his wife Julie was pregnant with their first child. It "exploded" in 2001 and became massively popular around the world. "Just keeping the site going was a challenge under the amount of traffic we were getting," Pankhurst continued. "Also, the intrusion of the press into your lives could be depressing sometimes — part of the package I suppose." The website was then sold to ITV in 2005 for £175 million, before eventually being flogged on to DC Thompson for the significantly lower price of just £25 million.

On Twitter - another social network which has helped to clobber Friends Reunited - many cheeky commentators said they were surprised it hadn't closed down years ago. Other people questioned whether Facebook would ever endure the same fate. poll loading Friends Reunited founder Steve Pankhurst says the site is closing | Daily Mail Online Share 143 shares He said of the site's current 10 million registered users, most had contact details that were out of date. HISTORY OF FRIENDS REUNITED 1999 - Julie and Steve Pankhurst team up with Jason Porter after being inspired by attempts to find old classmates from school. 2000 - The Friends Reunited site is officially launched 2005 - The site boasts more than 15 million users and in December is sold to ITV for £175 million ($250 million). 2009 - ITV sells the site to DC Thompson for £25 million ($31 million). 2014 - Steve Pankhurst and Jason Porter are asked to come back on board to help revitalise the site. 2016 - Mr Pankhurst announces Friends Reunited is to be 'put to bed'.

Mr Pankhurst, who sold Friends Reunited to ITV in 2005 for £175 million ($250 million) had agreed to take on an attempt to revitalise the flagging site from its current owners DC Thompson. DC Thompson bought it from ITV for £25 million ($31 million) in 2009. Writing in a blog post , Mr Pankhurst said: 'I knew it was near impossible to reboot something that was old and in decline. 'I had hoped that after putting it back to near its original form, that it would plateau off, which it did, and be self sufficient in terms of covering its cost. 'But over the year, it became clear that most of the actual users coming to the site were using it purely as a message board. 'And I also realised, that of the 10m+ users registered, a lot had done so over a decade ago and hence their contact details were out of date.

So even if you were coming to the site to find someone and wanted to contact them, how frustrating it must be to see them listed there and try to contact and then get no response.' Friends Reunited (old logo pictured) once attracted more than 23 million users and was a popular way for people to get in touch with old friends and class mates. It also attracted its share of controversy as people rekindled old relationships and had affairs with former class mates He added that 'most importantly' the site was not covering its costs and so would not continue indefinitely. Mr Pankhurst said: 'Therefore, whilst it's sad, I believe it's time to move on and put Friends Reunited to bed. And I feel like I am the right person to do it.' Mr Pankhurst and Mr Porter agreed to take over running Friends Reunited two years ago after being approached by DC Thompson. The pair said the code was a 'bit of a mess' when they got it back. Friends Reunited was set up in 2000 by Jason Porter (left), Steve Pankhurst (right) and Julie Pankhurst (middle).

Mr Pankhurst said he was now looking to start a new project called Liife Mr Pankhurst said that he now hoped to concentrate on a new project called Liife – a website for recording pictures and memories without sharing them with the rest of the world. Instead users will be able to share them with a select group of people. He said: 'One of my biggest gripes with Facebook are the times people tag or share photos of you and everyone sees them. And I too don't want to see everyone else's group party shots. 'Liife will be a great way to store the life of a child through pictures and memories. I also wnt to go back and plot the life of my late father through talking to my mum.

'There are lots of uses for it and other ideas and features to Liife — all will be coming over the next year.' Read more: Steve Pankhurst: Friends Reunited | Startups.co.uk: Starting a business advice and business ideas Startups.co.uk: Starting a business advice and business ideas Steve Pankhurst, the co-founder of Friends Reunited, talks about the amazing rise of the famous website by The Startups Team Tools: Compare supplier quotes to help you start a business Steve Pankhurst developed the idea of&nbsp; &nbsp;when his pregnant wife Julie expressed a desire to get back in touch with long lost chums. Since it’s launch in 1999, Friends Reunited has become one of the most popular websites on the net, attracting over 10 million members and a deluge of media coverage. The brand has now expanded to cover three sites, with the Pankhursts keen to establish their idea outside the UK. We talked exclusively to Steve about how he created one of the web’s most successful sites from his bedroom in Barnet, north London. Was it always your intention to start up your own business – did you always want to be an entrepreneur?

Well, me and my business partner, Jason Porter, had worked together for about 10 years and had been writing big internet systems for insurance companies – this was at the height of when people had loads of ideas for the internet, about 1998-99. We felt that we had some good ideas, we could do it much better than what was going on at the time. You spotted a gap in the market with Friends Reunited – did you do much research into this? We did check out the market. The way the idea came about was that we wanted to track down some friends when Julie was pregnant, so we went on the internet and looked on some message boards and it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. Because we were both database programmers, we thought ‘No, that’s not the way you do it, you start off with your school and work that way.’ To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think it would work in Britain, I didn’t think that school reunions would be taken in the same way as America, with their high school year books and things like that.

We came across a similar site in America, but we found out that it was just American and not UK schools, so that’s when the money bells started to ring in my head! It amazes me now that a successful site in America hadn’t been repeated around the world. We did it very quietly, we didn’t do masses of advertising, we just relied on word of mouth and PR, which is completely free. It just seemed to tap into the imagination of people and by the summer of 2001 the media had picked up on it and it created a kind of snowball effect, which was more like an avalanche really, it just went mad. Talk us through the decision of turning the site from a hobby to a full-time job – was it hard? That was very difficult. Me and Jason had a lucrative contract for these insurance companies, but to be honest we were bored essentially making money for other people. Friends Reunited was sitting there and you could see the potential of it, it had a couple of mentions in the press, and by March 2001 it had 20,000 people on it.

You could see it working, people were getting reunited, and at this time it was costing us nothing apart from our time, which was every spare moment of the day, as we were working at the same time. But it wasn’t making any money either, the advertising revenue had bombed out on the internet – it was make or break time. At this time no-one had anyway of making money through websites apart from advertising, there were very few subscription-based services out there. So we decided to pack in our jobs and decided to go full time with this. At the same time, we introduced the £5 charge – it’s still free to register, but £5 to contact people. At that time we had no idea whether it would work or not. Weren’t you worried that the charge would drive people away? Yes, we had a lot of complaints from people saying ‘How dare you charge, the internet is free’ and it wasn’t until we wrote back that we explained that actually it was costing us a couple of thousand of pounds a month on servers, a thousand pounds a month on bandwidth, we’re spending all our time, two families, on this, and people don’t realise. All we’re trying to do is make a living.

To be fair, most people accepted it. Did you get consultants in to deal with these decisions? God no! We both have 20 years of business experience each and we are really anti-marketing and consulting. To be honest, there is so much bullshit that goes on in business consultancy – you base it on your gut feeling and what’s best for you. If we had got anybody on board, they would’ve turned it into this monster that would never have worked. If it had been two years previously, we might have been sucked into the VC route and that would’ve completely ruined us. You were just starting a family when you set up the site. Looking back, would you have timed the business differently? To be honest, it all just happened. There is one big thing we’d do differently, which would be to delegate a bit more. From April and May in 2001, for the rest of the year it just went mad – between me, Jason and Julie we were just trying to keep the site going, we were the 10th biggest site in the country, alongside the BBC and AOL, which was ridiculous.

We were running it from my bedroom, we were doing three to four interviews a day with TV and radio and trying to hang on with the advertising and marketing, trying to answer three to four thousand emails a day. We tried to do everything, there wasn’t time to stop and think, because it was seven days a week, 24 hours a day. We didn’t want to employ people – what we should’ve done is employ people because it was just so stressful, but we didn’t know if it was just a flash in the pan, we didn’t want to employ people only to find six months down the line there was no business there. We were very conservative with our methods – we didn’t invest any money, we didn’t strategise anything, we just went with the flow, there was a lot of luck involved. You’ve expanded into several other areas, such as CDs. Do you want to corner the internet nostalgia market? No, not really. We try to go into areas which fit in with our user base. We have dabbled with a few that haven’t worked, but our sister site Genes Reunited works very well.

The other one was dating, which was also very big on the internet, so it seemed a natural area to go into. Social networking is an area which we are looking into, it’s very similar. We’re not thinking we will open a financial services site, because that just wouldn’t fit. We always try things out and if we get negative feedback we just drop it very quickly. We have got very good growth and we are looking to expand into all the English-speaking countries and push the social networking. How does starting up on the net now compare with when you started in 1999? I think it’s a lot harder. I think essentially it’s still the same, in terms you’ve got to get your site known. In most respects it’s harder because there’s not the hype, there’s not money readily available. But I think that, in a way, is a good thing because so many people bought into the hype and you had young kids with ideas who lost millions and billions and that’s a horrible experience to go through. But now, I think that would be hard to do, I think banks and VCs would be more wary. What would your advice be to someone looking to start up a profitable website?

The idea’s got to be good – it’s hard work, it’s a long haul. Keep the idea simple, just throwing money at it and advertising it doesn’t work. It took us about a year before we saw any momentum on the site, until then you’ve just got to put the hours in. Can another startups website come from nowhere and do a ‘Friends Reunited’? Yes, course. You’ve got to think that there was this whole nostalgia trip at the turn of the century about schooldays and the 1970s – we tapped into that, it was just luck, it just happened. I’m sure there are other ideas out there and other sites that can come through To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think it would work in Britain. Park for £10 and make me a millionaire | Technology | The Guardian Park for £10 and make me a millionaire Close This article is 10 years old Young internet entrepreneurs have changed the way people book holidays, sell advertising space and meet old schoolfriends. The latest twentysomething to come up with a groundbreaking scheme believes he will revolutionise the way we park. Anthony Eskinazi, 23, is set to go international with his website, .

Having launched the venture in Britain this month, he has already presented his idea on US radio and could make millions if he expands his business across the globe. On Eskinazi's free website, users can advertise their parking spaces, normally a driveway. Those who are looking for somewhere to park simply type in the postcode of their destination. The advertiser and driver then contact each other and fix a price. They can even print off a pre-contract. The site has been praised by other internet entrepreneurs and differs from other parking 'listings' websites, Eskinazi claims, because of its ease of use. 'I don't mean to be arrogant, but my site is better than everything else out there,' he said. 'Users can look up popular football or music stadiums, as well as transport links, and immediately see which spaces are available near by.' The Leeds University graduate will hope to follow in the footsteps of Martha Lane Fox, Alex Tew, and Steve and Julie Pankhurst. Fox, together with Brent Hoberman, founded Lastminute.com in 1998, when she was 24.

Last year, when still a student, Tew created a website named The Million Dollar Homepage , and solicited advertisers to buy advertising space measured in pixels on the homepage. In five months all of the space was sold and Tew had made more than a million dollars. The Pankhursts, a young couple, set up friendsreunited from their bedroom in 1999. The idea for the parking project came to Eskinazi when he was on holiday in San Francisco last summer and was heading for a baseball game. 'We were looking for parking and passed so many driveways where we could have parked but didn't have permission,' he said. 'I thought it would be useful to pay someone $10 to let me park at their house.' Eskinazi built the site himself. 'I already knew that people parked their cars in people's houses around Wimbledon time. And I wanted to extend that to the whole country,' he said. He plans to make money through advertising and by charging local businesses for attracting shoppers who would otherwise be put off by a lack of parking. 'It's a matter of arithmetic,' said Doug Richard, an internet entrepreneur and former expert on the BBC television programme Dragons' Den.

'The trick is to get it perfectly right in one city before taking it on to a different one, although almost all young internet entrepreneurs wouldn't do this,' he said. 'But in time it could become reasonable. He could get £100,000 a year, which is a nice earner.' Eskinazi said that his website already has up to 50,000 'hits' a day. He plans to launch in Canada, Australia and Europe, and is consulting US lawyers about the website's launch in North America. Wish I'd thought of it Steve Pankhurst, Friends Reunited millionaire: 'Geeky techies are the new celebrities' - Telegraph Technology Advice Steve Pankhurst, Friends Reunited millionaire: 'Geeky techies are the new celebrities' Overtaken by Facebook, the Friends Reunited website was shut down this week after 15 years - but that hasn't stopped its co-founder dreaming big online Steve Pankhurst with his wife Julie, the founders of Friends Reunited.

Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith By Peter Stanford Comments It’s happened to Mark Zuckerberg and it’s happened to Steve Jobs, but Steve Pankhurst is still waiting for Hollywood to come calling at his semi in Barnet. We are yet to see a big screen celebration of his internet-age success story. Yet in any roll call of the pioneers of the e-era, this 52-year-old software engineer is surely right up there, with his rags-to-riches tale of dot-com glory. Back in 2000, from his back bedroom in suburban north London, Pankhurst, his wife Julie and friend Jason Porter launched Friends Reunited , a social networking site before the phrase had even been uttered. Within a year, 2.5 million people had signed up to get back in touch with old school friends. At its peak, 23 million were using it. In 2005 ITV bought the site for £175 million, making the Pankhursts and Porter rich beyond their wildest dreams. But this week, after years of being eclipsed by the slicker, smarter Facebook, Friends Reunited called it a day.

It was Pankhurst who issued the death notice on his blog, having returned to the business in 2014 in an ultimately futile effort to revive its fortunes. Friends Reunited was hugely successful when it launched in 2000 but later lost ground to the likes of Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. ITV bought the site for £120m in 2005 but sold it to DC Thomson four years later for £25m. “Take Mark Zuckerberg,” Pankhurst muses on the Facebook founder. “He’s a geeky developer just like me. Except that nowadays geeky techies are almost cool. In fact they’re the new cool. They’re celebrities. When I was first doing it, you were just a geek. I wish I could be cool now, but I’d just be the cynical one sitting chuckling to himself at the back of the room.” That would require him to be in the room in the first place, and Pankhurst is, by his own admission, a bit of a recluse.

Despite the tidal wave of obituaries for Friends Reunited, he has resisted all offers of face-to-face interviews, finally agreeing to meet me in typical geek fashion on Skype - sound only, no pictures. "Jason and I always described ourselves to each other as cowboys. Like a cowboy builder who puts up dodgy walls, we were building dodgy sites" Steve Pankhurst “By nature,” he apologises as I stare at the blank screen, “I’m not someone who likes standing up in front of people. There are some in my industry who have gone on to make themselves into a brand name, but I am the sort of person who just wants to disappear. When we sold Friends Reunited in 2005, I never wanted to do another interview in my life.” In its heyday, it was Steve’s wife, Julie, who was the public face of the site. She had come up with the idea while on maternity leave in 1999 with the first of their two daughters, after using the internet to trace her long lost grandfather. “She was a natural at it,” he recalls of her presentational skills, “whereas someone wrote that I sounded like a broken record player.

In fact she’s probably listening to me now, saying all this, from the next room.” Steve Pankhurst with his wife Julie. At which stage he abruptly gets up from his computer and disappears, returning a few moments later to report that his 13-year-old daughter has been eavesdropping. The domestic interlude seems to have relaxed him a little and he briefly relents and switches on the Skype camera. A bearded, bespectacled face stares back at me. Wearing t-shirt and jeans, he is hemmed in by shelves of books and DVDS. “I’m still a geeky developer,” he says. “I’m just a sponge for all new technology. I’ve got them all here – Twitter, Facebook, Slack. I keep in touch with my daughters on Snapchat. I’m probably the only 52-year-old to use Snapchat. That’s me being sad again.” I can’t decide whether he is playing up to a stereotype or just being honest. "Pankhurst has filled the gaps between his walking excursions by becoming a “business angel”, investing in the next generation of techies trying to follow in his footsteps" So is this, I wonder, the same back bedroom from which Friends Reunited was launched?

He laughs. “No, we moved, but its only half a mile away, and it’s still a semi, only a slightly bigger one.” My question appears to have crossed a line in intrusion. The Skype camera is clicked off. Pankhurst’s voice, though, remains warm, self-deprecatingly charming, and even occasionally confessional. He studied maths at Imperial College, London because he didn’t know what else to do. “It was what I was good at. And my first job [at GEC] just happened to be as a software engineer, because of my maths, and then I stuck with it because, again, I didn’t know what else to do. I have never been a natural programmer.” Good enough, though, to launch one of the most successful websites of the noughties. “Jason and I always described ourselves to each other as cowboys. Like a cowboy builder who puts up dodgy walls, we were building dodgy sites. When we set up a consultancy in the 1990s, we called ourselves VCS – Visual Computer Solutions. Or as we said, Very Crap Solutions. We were fast and cheap.

I probably shouldn’t tell you that.” Steve, Julie and their business partner Jason Porter. So what has he spent all those millions on? “We’ve tried to keep grounded. I’m not materialistic. What the money did was give me time for experiences - nice holidays as a family, or doing challenges I set myself. I know I’m sounding sad but I’ve been walking to Lands End and back in stages over the last 10 years, usually about once a month, with a couple of mates.” No round-the-world cruises or fast cars? “No,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m just boring.” Instead, Pankhurst has filled the gaps between his walking excursions by becoming a “business angel”, investing in the next generation of techies trying to follow in his footsteps. “I started doing it 10 years ago, but not very well. I was putting my money into start-ups where I enjoyed using whatever they’d come up with. So it was all mainly to do with sport or music.

[He is a lifelong Spurs fan and has digitised his entire and vast collection of vinyl.] But that’s a bad way of investing, I’ve now learned.” For the last three years, he has immersed himself in what he calls London’s “tech scene”. “The youngsters I invest in teach me as much as I teach them,” he says modestly. “I try to guide them into allowing start-ups to bed down a bit, not to go off with wild ideas too quickly, to be cagey. I’m very conservative really, which is not ideal for an entrepreneur.” In 2014, Pankhurst and Porter were persuaded to renew acquaintances with Friends Reunited. Its new owners, Dundee-based publishers DC Thomson, who had bought it from ITV in 2009 for £25 million, recruited them to breathe new life into the declining site. As we now know, they failed to save it. “There’s always been a cycle to these sites,” says Pankhurst. “We lasted longer than our contemporaries like Bebo and Myspace. I was a bit disappointed it closed.

We had believed we could put it back to what it had originally been for – so that people could find people – and we did that pretty quickly, but so many of the details of people registered were out of date. And now there are just so many other ways to find people.” He seems philosophical about it, even when I broach the bad publicity Friends Reunited received. At one stage, it was blamed for a spike in the divorce rate on the grounds it encouraged classroom sweethearts to rekindle romances. “I suppose that sort of thing has always happened,” he says. “When everyone first got telephones, it was a great thing, but then the telephone could be blamed for divorce. You can’t blame a communications tool for marriages ending. It’s ridiculous.” Pankhurst currently has a new venture all of his own to nurture. No Porter – “he’s taking time off car-racing” – and no Julie. “I’ve tried to drag her in but she doesn’t want to be involved.” Liife is a site that will enable users to plot their lives through key moments by sharing pictures and mementos. “It feels like scratching an itch to be successful again.

And I’ve been getting such a buzz from it,” he enthuses. “Creating something is a fantastic feeling.” Another Friends Reunited in the offing? He chuckles. “It would be nice, but I am realist.” Steve Pankhurst’s new site is liife.com Friends Reunited to close - YouTube Friends Reunited to close Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Jan 19, 2016 Friends Reunited is to close. Friends Reunited, the social networking and friend finder website was launched on 1st July 2000 15 years ago after being conceived by Steve and Julie Pankhurst of Barnet, Hertfordshire and friend Jason Porter in 1999.

Julie Pankhurst's curiosity about the current status of old school friends inspired her to develop the website By the end of the 2000, it had 3,000 members and a year later the membership had increased to 2.5 million The slogan of Friends reunited was ‘Millions of memories all in one place’ By December 2005, Friends Reunited had over 15 million members December 2005 saw the site being bought by British TV company ITV plc for £175 million ($250 million). Although originally intended to be a site where members could find school friends from their past, it soon became one of the very first true social networks. At one point it was even used by potential employers who used entries to screen job applicants in a similar way that current social networks are now. Friends Reunited made a profit of £22 million in 2007 In August 2009 it was announced that Friends Reunited had been sold for £25 million to Brightsolid Limited, a firm which is owned by DC Thomson. By 2010 they had 23.8 million members.

In the UK, Friends Reunited was accused of being left behind by competitors who were primarily Facebook and Bebo. On 15 December 2011, the owners DC Thomson estimated that Friends Reunited was worth only £5.2 million. On 18 January 2016, Friends Reunited revealed that it will be closing down the website after 16 years of operation. Although this is a very sad event, if you are lucky enough to be 50 years old or more then you can join Buzz50 for free at Unlike Friends Reunited, Buzz50 has a diverse range of activities as well as being a friend finder and social networking site. Buzz50 even has over 50 forums at where a whole variety of subjects are discussed and live chat rooms at Category The story so far…….. – Steve Pankhurst – Medium FriendsReunited, GenesReunited……(long gap)…….Angel Investor, ScruffyBeggar…..Liife Jan 9, 2016 The story so far…….. In 1999, Julie, my wife was pregnant with our first child.

She had just used the internet to track down her long lost Grandfather that she had never seen. Realising the power of the internet, and a desire to find out what some of her old school friends were up to — whether they too had families — she came up with the idea of FriendsReunited. Myself and my business partner, Jason, both of us being developers at the time, were looking for ideas to branch out on our own. We saw the internet as the future. It took well into 2000 for me to do anything about Julie’s idea — we were busy consulting, Amber was born, and we had a long list of spurious ideas to get on with — dating, party bags and fantasy football being some of them. But in the summer, after much nagging by Julie, I put together a very first version of the site. This is what it looked like — yep, it’s pretty horrible. I was not a graphic designer (obviously!) so just knocked together anything. But, the functionality worked and very soon we started to get people coming to the site and registering themselves against schools.

Nine months later, after a redesign, some hard work, lots of extra features, encouragement from users and the odd mention or two in the press, things started to get interesting. We gave up our jobs, and introduced a subscription to allow people to contact old friends — and to allow us to survive (We were not part of the internet hype and didn’t go out and try and raise funding to continue) In the summer of 2001 the site exploded — through natural word of mouth and article after article about the desire to look back. Our lives changed forever. (Thats my Mum and Dad in the logo by the way) I describe this period as both the best and worst of my life. On the positive side the site just didn’t stop growing and revenue was flowing — and we were having a fantastic time being interviewed on TV and radio nearly every other day. However, rather naively, we thought we could do everything and it became very stressful and completely 24/7. Just keeping the site going was a challenge under the amount of traffic we were getting. Also, the intrusion of the press into your lives could be depressing sometimes — part of the package I suppose.

By the end of 2002, exhausted, we started to scale things up, bringing in a new Management team to run the business day to day, and allowing me to step back and do what I like — which is come up with and try out new ideas. I had watched some members of my family doing genealogy research and building family trees. I saw how time consuming and disjointed everything was. I started building GenesReuntied as a way of helping people share their family research and find others who have information related to their trees. We also launched a variety of other services including Dating, Jobs and a Connections site. But GenesReunited was the one that stuck and grew nicely too with a proven subscription model. By 2005, a number of companies came knocking on the door. It was difficult to turn them away and we eventually sold to ITV at the end of the year. I was shown the door (I am not a corporate beast and very happy to exit) — but also given a 5 year period when I wasn’t allowed to do anything to compete. A bit harsh but then I was happy to take time off and reflect on things.

The previous 5 years had been a roller coaster and very exhausting. Amongst the things I did with my time was to sort through all my old junk — I am a bit of a hoarder. I started to digitise a lot of my old vinyl records and cassettes. I began scanning in my old photos. And I found a box of old diaries from my youth detailing parties, gigs, holidays and football games that I went to. As a result I wrote a small website called LifeChart as somewhere to document and store all these moments in my life. It was a personal project and I didn’t publish the site to world. I still have all the data. (Not sure my design skills had improved over the 5 years) During the next 7–8 years I didn’t really take too much notice of what was going on at FriendsReunited. I did notice they tried to do something similar to LifeChart within the main site — it seemed a bit hidden and complicated though. Also during this time ITV sold the business onto DC Thomson.

They were a company who already had a genealogy site called Find My Past, so it was obvious they were purchasing the company for GenesReunited rather than FriendsReunited — which obviously had started to decline with the likes of Facebook taking over social networking. DCT decided to pivot FriendsReunited into more of a memory/retro picture site. The school friends part of it got pushed back into the background a bit. It was a brave move and could have been quite fun — unfortunately the site continued to decline. Two years ago I was approached by DC Thomson. They had decided to concentrate on family history and wind down FriendsReunited but offered a deal where I would take it back for a period and see what I could do with it. I had a long think and got back together with my original co-founder Jason, and pitched my old idea of the LifeChart — together with a few new spins on it. So we did a deal. The first part of our plan was to put FriendsReunited back to make it more like the original site — that is, listing your schools and memories of your school days. The code was a bit of a mess but it didn’t take Jason long to put things back under our control.

And then I got on with developing a completely new service based on the LifeChart idea. It took a bit longer than I had planned — lots of external distractions and Jason decided to move on but finally, at the start of 2016, I am ready to launch something. More on that in a moment. Back on FriendsReunited it was never about re launching the old service into something grand. I knew it was near impossible to re boot something that was old and in decline. I had hoped that after putting it back to near its original form that it would plateau off (which it did) and be self sufficient in terms of covering its costs. But over the year it became clear that most of the actual users coming to the site were using it purely as a message board. And I also realised, that of the 10m+ users registered, a lot had done so over a decade ago and hence their contact details were out of date. So even if you were coming to the site to find someone and wanted to contact them, how frustrating it must be to see them listed there and try to contact and then get no response.

It felt like that if you were trying to track an old friend down then we, Facebook and numerous other sites had sort of done that. But importantly — it hasn’t covered its costs and like any business this can’t continue indefinitely. Therefore, whilst it’s sad, I believe it’s time to move on and put FriendsReunited to bed. And I feel like I am the right person to do it. But every negative needs a positive so back to Liife. Liife will be a version of my original LifeChart idea. It’s not unique and has been done by lots of people (including Facebook) The idea being to plot your life through a series of key moments — these could be anything from holidays, parties, marriage, kids, gigs, sporting events etc. These could be past moments or moments that are happening now. We are trying to make a site that helps people share pictures and memories with ONLY the people who shared them with you. One of my biggest gripes with Facebook are the times people tag or share photos of you and everyone sees them. And I too dont want to see everyone else’s group party shots. Plus the fact that they are lost in a mass of vacuous information.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is fantastic for lots of things and keeping in touch, but as a tool to plot my life its rather cumbersome. Liife will be a great way to store the life of a child through pictures and memories. I also want to go back and plot the life of my late father through talking to my mum. There are lots I don’t know that won’t take that much research. There are lots of uses for it and other ideas and features to Liife — all will be coming over the next year. Liife is on no way a replacement for FriendsReunited — they are completely different products. FriendsReunited has had its day — it’s time to move on to a new Liife. (If you want to take a look at Liife and sign up then go to liife.com ) FriendsReunited, GenesReunited……(long gap)…….Angel Investor, ScruffyBeggar…..Liife 45

Question: Which website was founded by Steve and Julie Pankhurst in 1999?
Answer: Friends Reunited