Friends forever

I imagine that I'm not alone in having received yesterday a badly spelt email from Friends Reunited informing me that the site was being closed down. It was like hearing that a vaguely famous person from your childhood had died, someone you hadn't thought of for years but had assumed was long since dead.

The site's heyday seems lost in the mists of time, but it was without doubt a pioneering venture, one that paved the way for Myspace, Facebook et al, and the whole Web 2.0 revolution. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't snigger at its primitive clunkiness and instead mark its passing with a modicum of respect.