Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Classmates.com sucks

Classmates.com sucks….for many reasons, but I’ll delve into a few here.

 

First, the constant emails.  Even unsubscribed to what used to be their 3-4x weekly garbage, I still get stuff weekly telling me to “check out who signed my guestbook”.  When I click on it, it asks me to upgrade to a Gold membership so I can see who is dumb enough not to find me on Facebook and still thinks Classmates.com is a relevant way to keep in touch with people.

 

Second, dumbassedness.  I received a spam from Classmates.com about 2 years after I signed up on the site that said “Hey John Blicha, look who just joined Classmates.com?  John Blicha!”  It seriously had my picture in both places.  They don’t have a filter to pull out the person they’re talking about?  Plus, I hadn’t JUST joined, I made that mistake long before that.  Did no one else from my high school sign up in those 2 years?  That, I believe…

 

Third, strategically missing the boat.  The sad part is that if Classmates.com had picked a different business model and executed better, they could have been (nearly) as big as Facebook.  But they wanted us to buck up $20 or $30 for a Gold membership to enable some of their real value.  These are the things they should have been giving away to drive traffic to come to their site and stay there, which would mean advertisers would want to be there too.

 

Whoever is running Classmates.com should be fired for spam, dumbassedness and lack of strategic vision.  I won’t even talk about how choppy the site looks or how difficult it is to navigate.

 

Horrible, horrible site.  Be ashamed.

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