Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Classmates.gone

With many clicks and a Yahoo answers search I've managed to delete my Classmates.com account. It was not an intuitive process. I'd been on classmates since like the late 90s.

Why did I leave? Well it's because I've switched to Facebook which is much better. Facebook like classmates lets me connect with people I know from back when. However with classmates both me and the other person have to pay classmates money to interact in any kind of meaningful way. Facebook is free and frictionless. And classmates is hardly cheap. Why should I pay classmates to broker a connection. Facebook recognizes the huge pent up demand with classmates and solved the dilemma - make it free to connect with people and for people to connect with you. Like any free service such as tv or gmail or whatever I'm well conditioned to accept some targeted passive advertising on the screen in exchange for using the cool free service. Facebook gets this in a way classmates never did.

Classmates.com is like that girl from High School. You know the one. Popular, good looking, She acted at times like she was kinda sorta maybe in a way interested in you. You were friends and she seemed to flirt with you at times. Phoned you more than once. But then she seemed to almost always have a boyfriend in some complicated situation. You never really knew where you stood with her or if she was really interested. So eventually you get to graduation day and nothing ever came of it. You never went out or kissed. And that's fine, no regrets. Maybe if you'd made a move things would have turned out different, or maybe you would have just made a fool of yourself. In any case it's all good and everyone moved on to better things.