Friends Reunited was launched in 1999 and was the UK's "Facebook before Facebook" (or, more realistically, the UK's Classmates.com) but oriented around people you'd attended school with rather than all friends in general (though you could look up anyone by name). By the start of 2002, it had 2.5m users. By the end of 2005, 15m. It then sold for £120m ($208m at the time) before Bebo and MySpace (and much later, FB) ate its lunch.
All that aside, the site he mentions that lets you note "crushes" sounds a lot more pleasant than one where you rate "fitties." And one university enacting an idiotic policy does not a bad startup scene make..
Completely agree, friendsreunited was massive, and if they hadn't taken their eye off the ball, they could have been what facebook is today in the UK.
Their main mistake was to charge users for membership if you wanted to communicate with other users. I believe it was £10/year. Even when facebook came on the scene, they continued charging users.
(Yes, charging users directly, however much 37signals etc trumpet it, is sometimes a very short sighted bad thing to do, particularly when free competitors arrive as they invariably do if you have a reasonably sized market).
So facebook did happen in the UK. Plenty of startups happen in the UK.
That's also one reason classmates.com never caught on in the U.S. They charged to do anything interesting on their site (plus it was ugly).
One thing to take away from all of these examples is that just having an "idea" isn't enough. You have to execute it. If all you needed was an idea, Friendster would've been successful and not MySpace... and then Facebook.
I would call it copy-writing :). On a serious note, it concerns much more than UCL. There is quite a lack of support for young startups especially in UK Universities (First hand experience). With the amount of tech talent UK has' this kind of incident shows why a lot of big things are not coming from this end. I just wish the person that made this call would be called out by a major publication.
All that aside, the site he mentions that lets you note "crushes" sounds a lot more pleasant than one where you rate "fitties."
I am sure he would have got round to sorting that out. Of course removed it from .co.uk. too.
Friends Reunited was launched in 1999 and was the UK's "Facebook before Facebook" (or, more realistically, the UK's Classmates.com) but oriented around people you'd attended school with rather than all friends in general (though you could look up anyone by name). By the start of 2002, it had 2.5m users. By the end of 2005, 15m. It then sold for £120m ($208m at the time) before Bebo and MySpace (and much later, FB) ate its lunch.
All that aside, the site he mentions that lets you note "crushes" sounds a lot more pleasant than one where you rate "fitties." And one university enacting an idiotic policy does not a bad startup scene make..