Friends Reunited: a party no one wants to attend?

Friends Reunited always seemed a rather odd idea to me. Like turning up to a school reunion sober. Who would want to do that?

Like millions of other people I signed up when the craze was at its height. Logged in a couple of times, did a half-arsed update of what I had been up to since I left school, and then never went back.

Eight years later, and with ITV set to sell Friends Reunited for rather less than the king's ransom the broadcaster paid for it, I thought I should check back. And it reminded me exactly of why I stopped looking in the first place.

"Back home after the joys of travelling!" says one of my old school acquaintances. "Having spent 14 months experiencing the delights of the world – it is a massive shock to the system to be back home. Still back to reality it is and paying off those travelling debts! Am now back at work and buying a house – wow, bit of a difference to last year!"

So you've been travelling. You did it on credit at a time when interest rates have just hit a record low. And you're buying a house at the bottom of the market. Get out of my face!

"After a decade or so of working and living in Hong Kong I am now living in the Big Apple with my husband... the hustle and bustle life goes on ... I left the rat race of the financial world and launched my own online gift store."

I lived in Norwich for a bit and bought a house in Amersham – it's in south Bucks – and I'm on the verge of selling it for £30,000 less than we paid for it. Who's next?

"Still playing hockey and enjoy sailing on our Sadler 32." I enjoy Sky+ and own a six-year-old Mini. "Recently confirmed as doctor ... have our own business ... We just had our third child ..."

It would be at this point, were it a genuine reunion rather than a virtual one, that I would have emptied my beaker of warm white wine and headed for the fire exit, pausing only to grab a souvenir on the way out.

Because Friends Reunited was always less about staying in touch with your schoolmates than checking in to see whether they had been more successful than you. They should have called it Schadenfreude.com, or rather its exact opposite, "success sadness", which was once coined as Erfolgtraurigkeit. Catchy.

There was always a thin line, when it came to writing your own update, between bigging yourself up and looking like a tosser. Plus the dangerous possibility that some people might assume it was a complete work of fiction.

Nowadays, of course, you can big yourself up all over the web with no need for Friends Reunited. My favourite is the application on Facebook that allows you to colour in all the countries you have visited and shove it in the face of all your friends. "Create your own travel map and see what percent of the world you have visited." Yeah. Or get a hobby.

Which makes me wonder exactly how much ITV expects someone to pay for it. In an age of myriad social networking sites, getting in touch with an old buddy via Friends Reunited is the online equivalent of sending someone some Polaroids through the post.

Anyway, back at the top of my Friends Reunited page, the last post is from a chap called Andy Sweeting. I remember Andy! "Does anyone still look at this?" he asks. No one has answered.

Posted by John Plunkett

Sourcce: guardian.co.uk