The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

Classmates.com said that I had 313 other classmates registered. You go to their Web site, click on “Overseas American /Canadian schools” at the bot- tom (or go straight to the Canadian, German or Swedish icons). Then pick your country and city. The site’s current directory includes only schools located in the United States and Canada and American or Canadian schools located overseas, and does not support the addition of other schools. When you click on your school, you get to a page that tells you how many from your school are registered. There is a fee, but to avoid it you can click on “basic” to see who is registered from your school. I saw at least 15 names that I recognized. Students from the four years prior to your graduation year are listed, but you can see all the years if you want to. There are e-mail address- es or groups or photo sections. To e- mail someone, you need to pay — it costs $32.50 for a year. Graduates.com is free. It also starts with a simple registration including a message space. Then you move on to selecting your school by country. And it’s fast. I got an e-mail confirmation and welcome within two minutes of reg- istering. You have to click on the link and activate your account within 15 days. On your profile page you can post all sorts of things, including pictures. The selection of schools includes ele- mentary and high school, and also has a section for colleges and universities. You then add yourself to your school by year that you graduated. Then you can search for classmates. The site allows you to invite people to join, but if they haven’t then you can’t find them on the search engine. The Web site was start- ed by Jason Classon, and you can donate money to help him maintain and run the site. Reunion.com also allows for simple info (but include the slashes in your birth date!). Don’t forget to unclick the “Please include me in dating directory” part at the bottom of the registration page (unless you want to use this ser- vice as well). It costs $36 for a year or $72 for three years to use the site to contact people. “Limited site access” is free, but if you want to e-mail people you will have to pay. You have to down- load a software program called “GoodContacts,” and you must have Outlook installed on your computer for this program to install. Alas. Alumni.net asks you to sign up, fill in a resume/CV and also provide the e- mail addresses of two friends, so that they can invite them. They then bom- bard you every step of the way with ads for online dating, pop-ups, etc. I man- aged to finally get through to the mem- bers-only section (I gave up two of my own dead e-mail addresses), and tried one search. Then I gave up as the bar- rage of ads was so great. All through the process they tell you that it’s all nec- essary to maintain a free site, but I took my freedom elsewhere. Classreport.com seems a clean site allowing you to donate money via PayPal and to post comments. It has a list of about 20 international high schools. It was started by Tim and Barbara Davis and officially launched on Feb. 5, 2003. On their Web site, they tell with wry humor their tale of why and how they started classreport.com. They set out a clear mission and with a suc- cessful background in database man- agement, they have created a Web site that allows for their objectives: “Create a Web site where students could keep their own contact information current. Create a class-based system rather than a school-based system. Rely strictly on volunteers from each class to operate their own class Web site. Rely strictly on voluntary contributions from each class to support the Web site. No adver- tising, no pop-up ads, no spam! Allow all class members to have full participa- tion with no membership fees and no dues. Create simple reports for the vol- unteer class administrators to print mailing labels, track missing students, send bulk e-mails to their class mem- bers and to easily back up the data to their personal computer. Create a dynamic online experience which would spark an interest among classmates in the lives of their fellow alumni — not just a huge, overpriced, online directory service.” Although a purely voluntary system of donation does allow for free- riding, there will most likely be someone in your class willing to pay the suggest- ed $15 per year to maintain your class site. Alumn i-find.com is free. You can even search before signing up. Then you sign up and fill in all kinds of infor- mation about yourself (if you feel like it). You can also add a school to the site. I added my international high school as I couldn’t find it on the list of internation- al schools. Gradfinder.com has an extensive list of schools in Denmark — near 100. And it’s free. It easily guides you through the registration. The only drawback is that you have to know what state your school is located in. Once I had researched which “state” the school was located in, I easily navigated the Web site. Youralumni.com will help you set up your alumni organization for a fee. They will also train the main contact person. Other than Web sites solely dedicated to finding old classmates, there are those where you can find out friends and family such as www.friendsreunited. co.uk , a British-based Web site. This one also costs money only if you want to con- tact people, and sends confirmations. But while the application process was simple, the Web site kept freezing, so I gave up. — Mikkela Thompson 88 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT Fishing for Friends on the Web