Classmates
I can't remember when I signed up for classmates.com—it must've been quite a while ago. Ever since then, they've been sending me regular annoying little spams telling me how many new classmates of mine have registered there. On a whim just now, I went and poked around a little, and discovered two things:
- There were a bunch of people in my high school class whose names I don't recognize at all. (There were under 400 people in the class, so I'd think I'd have at least heard most of their names. But then, it's been a while.)
- To contact someone who's registered there, you have to pay a $36 annual fee.
I consider that really annoying. They do a phenomenal amount of advertising (I'd guess half of the pop-under windows that come up while I'm browsing the Web are for Classmates), draw you in to get you to register for free to get in touch with your old friends, and then if you try to actually get in touch with anyone, zap you with a fee. It may well be a viable business model, but I don't think there's anyone from my high school class who I'd pay $36 to get back in touch with.
Especially not before trying a Web search to find them. Hmm—I bet I could post the names of people I wanted to get in touch with, and next time they did an ego-search in Google they'd find my page and drop me a note. . . .
Note: This entry modified 18 May 2006 to remove phrasing that readers apparently thought meant that I believed classmates.com was doing something illegal. I did not intend to suggest that they're doing anything illegal, and I grew uncomfortable with hosting comments on my blog that made potentially actionable defamatory statements. So I've deleted the comments that made accusations of illegal activity. Feel free to comment here if you like, but I will delete comments that I consider inappropriate.