Classmates.com was one of the first social networking sites of its kind. It gives older generations the ability to contact and find old classmates that are also on the site. IT is quite different from facebook.com being that the main objective of classmates.com is to find old friends while facebook.com on the other hand lets you contact people you know, as well as don’t know. Classmates.com is a much more private website. With a double blind email system people trying to contact each other can not see the others email unless they exchange them between each other. Also being that classmates.com is a paid subscription you don’t get advertising companies looking at your profile in order to target what advertising to place on your page as you do on facebook.com. However there is a downside to classmates.com. Being that you do have to pay to get the full benefits of classmates, many people seek use in free social networking sites like facebook.com or myspace.com, sites which probably offer more features and they’re free of charge. I believe that if classmates.com would like to keep up with their competitors they will have to be willing to make it free for all of the features on its website. Another problem with having to pay for a subscription to classmates.com is email spam. Whenever someone looks at your profile, or requests to email you, you get an email saying so and so has found you on classmates! When you click into this email, however, you are prompted to sign up for a subscription before you can contact the person. You can get many emails a day, but if you’re not going to subscribe then they are quite pointless. PC magazine actually rated classmates.com one of the worst sites when it comes to canceling subscriptions because even after you cancel your account on classmates.com you continue to get annoying spam emails.
What it comes down to is in order for classmates.com to keep its status as one of the top social networking sites, they would have to give free memberships with all of the features available, as well as find a way to stop annoying spam emails.
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Thanks, Matthew. Your summary brings up a couple of interesting points that we didn't really get into on Monday, such as the spam issue. The point of doing this post-presentation wrap-up is that you may have learned something during the class discussion, and it will help you process and remember it if you write it out. So, Matthew, do you think you ended up including anything here that you wouldn't have thought to include before the presentation?
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