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Rediscovering Classmates, the Kinder, Gentler Facebook
One of the original social networks is still at it
The older I get, spooling my life out behind me, the more I want to retrace those threads, trying to recapture some essence of thought, feeling, or experience. It’s a tic of late adulthood. The realization that you probably have less time ahead of you than behind you makes the memories even more precious.
So, when I heard someone randomly mention Classmates, it ignited the tiniest memory ember. “Classmates? I haven’t thought about that platform in years.”
Classmates launched in 1995, around the dawn of the modern internet, and it is arguably one of the first social networks. Before Facebook transformed the “face books” of college into a global social media phenomenon, one that would devour the personal information of almost 3 billion people, there was Classmates, a homey site that asked a simple question: Where did you go to school?
Its primary appeal was helping you reconnect to former high school classmates. (You could add other schools, but we all know that the bonds we built in high school are the strongest.) I joined in the late 1990s and, for a time, busily filled out my information, shared old photos, and even communicated with friends from both of my former schools. (I attended high…
