Friends Reunited was one the first social networking websites, it was created in 1999 by Julie Pankhurst with her husband Steve Pankhurst and their friend Jason Porter and was launched in 2000.

_[Screenshot]

Their goal was simple, find a way to reconnect people that hadn't been in contact for years, whether old friends, people that frequented the same highschool/college etc and to simplify it for them communicate leisurely even when miles apart.

It looked promising, by the first year it had registered 3000 people in the U.K and it even went on to reach 23 million users years later. But first had to come the dotcom burst, through which it stood it's ground and and came out as one of the contenders for the throne.

After that, it's popularity kept rising, thanks to it's sister sites such as Genes Reunited(for checking shared lineages) and others for dating or job hunting, that were helping it become a force to be reckoned with, specially in the U.K.
So much so that in 2005 ITV bought it for $250 millions and employers would even go so far to use it for screening job applicants. But unfortunately for them, the competition was only getting tougher and smarter and new underdogs such as Beebo and Facebook were on the prowl, wanting a piece of the pie.

And tough competition these new cats were indeed, specially with the likes of Facebook that was offering most of the same upgraded services, on the same 1 and for free. Friends Reunited didn't just wait there to get squashed though. In 2008 they abandoned the subscription charge, didn't work, matter of fact just a year later the website was sold to Brightsolid Limited for £25 million to see if they could turn things around.

In 2012 , they tried to rebrand themselves focussing on making the site mainly about long lost memories but unfortunately it wasn't enough and the website officially shutdown on 26/02/2016.

_{Browser Web - by geralt - CCO, pixabay.com}

The whole story is kind of sad and I'm sure there are many more websites that met such fates, but at the end of the day I guess that's just how the free market works. Nonetheless, we could learn from it by trying to always stay a few moves ahead of the other players as often as possible.

But at the end of the day let's not forget that even though we must care for and nurture steemit, that steem is way more valuable and that steemit is just 1 way to access the steem blockchain. just like busy is another way, so is dlive, dtube etc Steem-on!!

Peace