The first and eponymous website was created by a husband-and-wife team in the classic back-bedroom Internet start-up; it was the first online social network to achieve prominence in Britain, and it weathered the dotcom bust.

Friends Reunited branding was attached to CD collections of nostalgic popular music, and television programmes broadcast on the ITV network, which owned the site until August 2009.

Following ITV's sale of the site to DC Thomson's Brightsolid subsidiary in 2009, the company relaunched Friends Reunited in March 2012 with a new emphasis on nostalgia and memories.

[citation needed] In March 2008, after losing 47% of unique users in the previous 12 months,[2][22] the site dropped the subscription fee required to contact members, but the decline continued.

[24] In August 2009 it was announced that Friends Reunited had been sold for £25 million to Brightsolid Limited,[25] a firm owned by Dundee-based publisher DC Thomson.

[27] The site was relaunched in March 2012,[28] with the focus shifting from reuniting with school friends to being a place where people collect and share memories of the past.