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Why Do You Want Me to Sign Up on Classmates.com and Reunion.com?
By Marc | October 3, 2008
This post may or may not have any real deep information, but I just want to rant.
A month or so ago, I got two different emails saying that two different people wanted to get a hold of me on Reunion.com. Many people would probably jump at the chance to reunite with someone and thus create an account with Reunion. I wasn’t about to for a few obvious reasons.
The people in question…
- knew my email address in order to refer me. Why don’t they just send me an email?
- live in my city. Actually, they know where I live and have even been to my house.
- are more than just passing acquaintances. One of them is actually my brother-in-law, but the other I haven’t spoken to in months.
But, after weeks of putting it off, I decided to sign up to find out why these people referred me.
Let me just say that I despise sites like this. I had never been on Reunion before, but I had an eerie feeling it was just like Classmates.com.
Years ago, I signed up on Classmates because I kept seeing ads EVERYWHERE for them (and you still do). I thought perhaps it would help me to find out more about the people I went to high school with. You know, maybe even be able to contact them and catch up. After I signed up, I realized that the only advantages to a free membership were seeing the names of the other people who registered there and seeing very little information about them in a stripped-down profile because most people don’t bother to submit anything about themselves. You also can’t contact them unless you get a paid membership. So, in effect, they’re holding a carrot on a string in front of you.
Plus, it’s impossible to get an idea for how much a paid account costs (or how limited you are without it) until you enter your personal information for a free account. And also, according to their Terms of Service, they keep your money even if you don’t like them:
Refund Policy. Payment for joining Classmates is non-refundable.
I kept the account around for what seemed like forever and continued to get tons of annoying emails. I would have deleted my account, but it was nearly impossible to find a link to do so. I don’t remember how I eventually did it, but the way to do it now is found through the Help section. The account settings area has nothing even mentioning removing your information.
If, however, you have the paid account, and want to terminate the account, you can only do so by contacting Member Services. But don’t expect someone to help you if something’s wrong. From the Terms of Service:
If you have a dispute with us relating to the Website or the Subscription Services, you may cancel the Subscription Services. The cancellation of Subscription Services is your only remedy with respect to any such dispute that you may have with us.
So, anyway, Reunion is so much more evil in other ways.
As soon as I signed up, I was given a notice that one person tried to find me. The funny thing is that this person didn’t meet the criteria of the two people who sold me out to the Reunion devil. The individual searching for me, according to Reunion, is a 37 year old female from Grimes, Iowa. The two email Judases are both male, from Nebraska, and are not in their 30’s. And to make matters even funnier, both men were not listed anywhere.
As far as the female, age 37, Grimes, I knew it must have been someone from college, and fit the description of perhaps a handful of people. But, in order to find out who has searched for you, you need to sign up for a Premium membership of $12/month for a 3-month subscription (or $5/month for a 1-year subscription), which was never previously mentioned. Another stinking carrot.
When I went to delete my account, Reunion made it much easier to do than Classmates. All I had to do was go to my account settings and follow a link to cancel out.
But both websites made it quite obvious (and annoying) they wanted me to sign up for their pay services, using reminders at every possible turn.
To make matters worse, I might not even be the “Marc Joyce” they were looking for. So, I waste my time and money on a carrot that may or may not be real. A mysterious, possibly disappearing, carrot.
Also, once I sign up and pay, why would I want to continue using their service? This type of business may have been useful in the early days of the Internet when the web world was much smaller than it is now. With places like MySpace, Facebook, and other social networking sites, it’s never been easier to find someone from the past, and for FREE! In those places, there are even groups for people with common interests or backgrounds you can belong to in order to get updates.
There are also search engines. If the person has a website or blog, or is even listed on a company website, chances are, with a little time and effort, someone from your past may be found.
If you can’t find someone in those places, perhaps someone who you still keep in contact with knows more than you do. It may seem a little freaky, though, having connectivity to the world so easily available, but if you really want to find an old friend, there are easier and less expensive ways than Reunion and Classmates.
If you can tell me a reason for subscribing to these two sites and having a real use for them, please inform me. Perhaps I don’t understand them well enough.
Topics: Miscellaneous |