BIOS: Technology Means Business

WhoRemembersMe.Com is a new Web site designed to help you track down family, friends, neighbours, colleagues or acquaintances. Slightly more than a Friends Reunited rip-off, it offers a broad array of search facilities which let you find friends that used to live in the same street, drink in the local pub, or attend the same place of worship.

As a new visitor to the site you have to register and add your details. This enables other users to find your particulars. This is a completely free process and WhoRemembersMe.Com says it doesn’t pass on any of your personal information to third parties. The £5 annual registration fee lets you view the results of a search, ultimately allowing you to view a picture, read a profile and contact a member by e-mail. As an incentive, the normal annual registration fee of £5 per annum is waived for the first three months following the launch, until September 1. No credit card details are requested for the free registration offer. WhoRemembersMe.com uses Barclaycard Merchant Services payment system and assures all subscribers that personal information is protected under the Data Protection Registrar.

Searching for people is a more intuitive process than registering - which requires e-mail verification, entering an activation code and clicking on an activation link amongst other things - and the site’s clear, uncluttered design make navigating a much simpler process than Friends Reunited. You simply go to the search page, pick a category, enter a few details and click search. The site lets you run multiple searches in the following categories: streets, pubs, colleges, royal navy, sports team/clubs, places of worship, housing estates, working men’s/social clubs, universities, royal air force, members clubs, villages, work places, schools, British army, Royal Marines, children’s homes and other. Results of searches are not displayed until you’ve registered your own details and paid the £5 annual fee (or taken advantage of the free annual registration).

The search engine treats your search keywords as separate words unless you choose to match an exact phrase. These keywords are then compared with the keywords on all the attendances that match your other search criteria. If you have chosen to match all keywords, the search engine will look for attendances containing all the words you entered in the search box and, if it finds them all, consider the attendance to be a match. If you have chosen to match any words, the search engine will look for each of the words you entered into the search box and, if it finds one or more of them, consider the attendance to be a match.

The search engine also matches partial words. This means if you enter hat as a keyword, the search will find matches not only for hat, but hats, chattering or anything that contains the letters hat. This is useful in working around grammatical inconsistencies between search keywords and attendance keywords. For example, if you were searching for people employed in WRM Dairies, the person you’re looking for may have put WRM Dairy in their attendance keywords. To work around this, you could enter your keywords as WRM Dair, which would match both WRM Dairies and WRM Dairy.

WhoRemembersMe.Com is an interesting site if you’ve ever wondered whatever happened to ‘so-and-so’. You may also find it appealing if you’re inquisitive as to who remembers you. The success of the site will ultimately depend on a large subscriber base (there were just ‘a few hundred’ registered users at the time of this review) and it needs to get a large number of people registered as quickly as possible if it is to have the anticipated impact.

There’s no option to send voice messages, invite other members to telephone reunions, or to post messages on public message boards, but if you find Friends Reunited’s school, university, workplace or teams/clubs-based themes a little restrictive, give Who RemembersMe.Com a shot. Contacts will likely be slow for a year or so until it takes off and it’ll take a long time (if ever) to match Friends Reunited’s claim of eight million registered users (over 15,000 new registrations a day). Marketing will play a crucial role in determining whether WhoRemembersMe.Com becomes a serious contender to Friends Reunited. After all, this type of site/service is only as good as the size of its reader base. If all goes well in the UK, WhoRemembersMe.Com plans to launch in Australia, Canada and the US.