Friends Reunited Relaunch

Friends Reunited Relaunch
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Like a reformation tour of a once great boy band, Friends Reunited has whacked on the slap, shimmied into its old skinny jeans and re-launched as the social media blast from the past.

Heavy on the nostalgia, and the blokeiness, Friends Reunited is banking on the few of us that are kind of over Facebook, find Twitter an overload and have played with Pinterest.

It's a social media 3.0 assault, that embraces everything news about social media, without the awkward growing period in-between. It's all about images, shared stories, and little on spamming you with ads.

The new Friends Reunited wants to to tap into the past, the nostalgia of a happier time, helping you "access over 10 million 'memories'".

What does that mean? A wealth of images you don't have to supply yourself, including The Press Association photographic archive and The Francis Frith Collection.

You build your own folder of memories, very much in the vain of Pinterest, and share with your friends. You're channeled into your own back pages via sections like "The School Days, "I Collected", "Toys & Games", "I Tuned Into..." and "I was there".

The site is aiming for an older age group than Facebook. The nostalgic imagery used to illustrate each section, including Charles and Diana's wedding, donkey rides at Brighton Pier, women casting their first ballot and old caravaning holidays says the Friends Reunited user is not born post 1990.

Friends Reunited is making a big deal of privacy. While users have found the privacy controls on Facebook confusing, Friends Reunited is going for simple privacy settings you can easily control.

And it's heavy on the bloke factor. Interest lists include: Scandals & Disasters!, War & Politics, Weird & Funny. There's no images of the hairbraids and cupcakes that Pinterest, the social media site perceived to be of more interest to women, is famous for.