Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

Reunion.com And Wink Merge

CNET NEWS -- Feb 24 -- People-search sites Reunion.com and Wink have rebranded as MyLife, which can search over 60 social-networks and other information resources on the Web. MyLife will still make money primarily through Reunion.com's business model of paid subscriptions but there are more free services as well. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Wink To Merge With Reunion.com

TECH CRUNCH -- Nov 3 -- People-search engine Wink has joined forces with Reunion.com, a hybrid people-search/social networking site. The two companies will be launching a new website in early 2009. Wink allows users to simultaneously search for profiles across social networks including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a number of others. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

Mark Brooks: Rapleaf is another handy people search tool, if you know someones email address.

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Interview With Jeff Tinsley, Reunion.com

SOCAL TECH -- July 22 -- Jeff Tinsley is CEO and Founder of Reunion.com, which provides an online service to find and reconnect with people.

Q: What does the company do?
A: We help people track down people they've lost in their lives.

Q: What's the growth you are seeing?
A: We have more than 40m registered users, and we're adding 1.6M new registered users a month.

Q: I understand that you've got some quite healthy revenues and profits?
A: This year, we will generate more than $50m in revenue. Our plans show that we'll soon hit more than $100m. 

Q: It seems you might have lots of competition from other social networks. How has that affected your business?
A: Our audience is almost inverse of the Facebook audience. Using the Quantcast numbers, only 19% of Facebook's audience is over 35. Facebook only allows you to search the Facebook audience. We are searching half a billion records.

Q: You have both advertising and subscriptions in your business model, can you talk about your strategy there?
A: It's 90% subscriptions. Our audience, fortunately, can afford to spend $5 a month, to become part of the service. We have nearly a million active, paying subscribers.

Q: Do you get much competition from other people search services?
A: They're all very different. Some are directories, others as white pages. Ours is more social in nature, you have a profile, and you can search on profiles. 

Q: You took some venture capital in April of last year, what did that go towards?
A: That was really our Series A, it was probably the biggest Series A in a social network. We used that capital to reach more customers, improve our data, and our products and services.

Q: What have you learned on making a company successful?
A: The entrepreneurs don't think about all of the pieces they need to make a business successful - to make a product great, reach customers and make money. You've got to have all three of those pieces to be successful in business.
FULL ARTICLE @ SOCAL TECH

Reunion.com Added 1.6 Million New Members

BUSINESS WIRE -- July 15 -- Reunion.com announced that it set a company record, adding 1.6m new members in June, with nearly all of the registrations within the United States. Additionally, Reunion.com has reached a total membership record of more than 40m. Reunion was ranked as the 10th fastest growing Web site by comScore in March 2008. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE

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CrunchBase Information

Reunion

Information provided by CrunchBase

Reunion.com Divulges Child's Personal Data

LA TIMES -- July 2 -- Jane Yang, a 30-year-old marketing coordinator, was curious to see what would turn up if she searched for herself on Reunion.com, a Los Angeles-based social networking site. Sure enough, there was her name, which didn't bother her. What did startle Yang was seeing the name of her 4-year-old son. The CEO of Reunion.com, which just bought a huge database from a private supplier, has no idea how the information got online. Reunion.com is no stranger to privacy issues. In April, the company accessed the address books of people who register at the site and sent e-mails to all their contacts saying that so-and-so was searching for them, even when no such search was performed. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES

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CrunchBase Information

Reunion

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Twitter Leads Social Networks In Downtime

READWRITE WEB -- May 6 -- A new report from Royal Pingdom reveals that Twitter unsurprisingly led social networks in downtime for the first four months of 2008 with a total of 37 hours and 16 minutes. The good news is that even with all that downtime, that's still a 98.72% uptime percentage for the first third of the year. The next closest social network on the list in terms of downtime was Reunion.com, which was down about half as long as Twitter. FULL ARTICLE @ READWRITE WEB

Reunion.com Names Chief Marketing Officer

START UP BEAT -- Oct 16 -- Social networking site Reunion.com today announced the appointment of Cornell McGee as CMO. McGee, former CMO and Senior VP of Acquisition Marketing at TRUE, will be responsible for overseeing all marketing and business development, with a focus on aggressive customer acquisition for the site. FULL ARTICLE @ START UP BEAT

This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.

Reunion Adds ZoomInfo Listings

START UP BEAT -- Aug 20 -- Reunion, one of the top-ranked social networking sites with almost 8 million unique visitors and 60 million searches for people monthly, today announced a partnership with business information search engine ZoomInfo. Reunion’s people search results will be augmented by ZoomInfo’s database of more than 36 million professionals and 3.8 million businesses. FULL ARTICLE @ START UP BEAT

Reunion.com Receives $25M Funding

BUSINESS WIRE -- Apr 16 -- Reunion.com (28 million users), the leader in helping adults find, reconnect and keep in touch with their friends and family, completed a $25M round of funding from Oak Investment Partners. Reunion.com has been a profitable online business since its inception, with revenue growth of over 100% annually. With almost 8 million unique visitors conducting 60 million searches for people monthly, Reunion.com is now one of the top-ranked social networking sites (Media Metrix). The company had $1.4 million in angel funding from Jeffrey Tinsley, former founder/ CEO GreatDomains.com, the former MySpace.com Chairman, amongst others. "Reunion.com is targeting the large and valuable post-Facebook demographic," says Jeffrey Tinsley, CEO/Founder. "This infusion of financial resources from Oak Investment Partners will help us accelerate our organic growth as well as give us capital to pursue strategic add-on acquisitions." FULL ARTICLE @ YAHOO NEWS