I was struck with an idea on the way to work earlier this week. It frustrated me that the typical classmates.com type sites (and no, I won’t link to them. If you want to go visit them, you can type it your own damn self) are all based on a charge, or at a minimum, ad-based model. I despise that. So if I find that someone has listed themselves on the site under my college or high school (or even grade school!) graduating class, then in order to actually REACH them, you have to pay. Screw all that noise. So my thinking was to start a free service where people just fill it all in on their own. Completely user generated. I’m not going to looking for your school, you put your school in. Yes, I store your data for you, but it NEVER gets sold anywhere. No advertising. You have to grant an individual permission to view your information, or let it all out for the public to see. Completely configurable on a person by person basis.

The site would have to run itself (yes, lots of up front database and scripting work), but would eventually be very low maintenance. The problem with this type of resource is that invariably, it doesn’t work unless you get people going to the site. I’m not good at site advertising. Flat out. Its not that I don’t see the mechanisms inherent in the Internet and the search engine pages and such for doing so … I just hate investing the time in doing so. Blah. So yet another project that ultimately gets shelved. Maybe I’ll resurrect it at some point when the mood strikes me.

Anyway … the other side effect of all that was it got me thinking about all the people who I’ve lost touch with that I wanted to get BACK in touch with. All hail Google, index of all things important. After about an hour or a bit more of poking around, it yielded up a few email addresses for me to try. And guess what … two replies this morning. One from a high school friend who I lost touch with around middle of college, and another a GRADE SCHOOL friend who was the first person I ever played D&D with. In fact, before we even knew what D&D was, we had made our own role playing type game and maps and stuff. Man, that was cool stuff. We were … hmm, maybe 8 or so at the time?

Bottom line: I’m really looking forward to more correspondence and rekindling some of those old friendships. The Internet is such a great enabler.

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