You have a new friend. Now please pay me.

So I received yet another email from reunion.com. This is the service wehre old high school chums and re-connect with each other. "Someone has signed your guest book". So I try to read my new guest book entry. The excitement builds! Whoops - sorry, you're not a real member. oh well...

You see, both Reunion, and other big name Classmates.com are pay services. You can sign on and make a profile, and even do a basic search for free, but to actually contact anyone you need to pay to become a member. And neither is really cheap - $35-40 per year. Now, unless you're like 5 minutes out of high school, connecting with old classmates is more of a curiosity than a driving force in your life. And at 26 years after graduation, I'm amazed that some of these people are still breathing. :)

First off, while I enjoy competition - do we really need tow companies that do the same thing? I mean, after sending a few emails to names you remember, aren't you pretty much done? With so many free sites (like MS) out there, what in the world would I get for $40? And why $40? Why not $10? For $10 I might sign up just to see who is around. But even at $10, you think I'm going to pay you $10 a year for 26 years? And that depends on which service your friends might be on. What if I pay reunion and my buddies are on classmates? Now we're paying $80 a year for both services. So much for competition bringing down prices. Maybe I'll just have to wait for one of them to go out of business and see what the other one does? I mean come on - if XM wants to buy Sirius, why can't one of these reunion services buy out the other. or have MS/FB just take over and we can have a free way to contact old buds.

Until then, my mailbox will continue to fill up with 'somebody searched for you' or 'somebody remembers you' and have to sit and wonder who from my past wants to pay me a visit...

John McLachlan
SHS 1982