I am not trying to contend that Facebook is superior to anything in any way. While it’s a highly useful tool, it’s had its problems, and it still lacks some basic features (which would make it more useful but less of an addiction, which is supposedly bad for business). But while that may be a wonderful topic for another day, today I’d like to focus on why classmates.com is so much worse than facebook.com.

Some years ago, when classmates.com first came into existence, I’d like to think that it was one of the first splogs I’ve ever seen. It was impossible to surf the web for more than five minutes before walking into one of their annoying advertisements. And no, they weren’t the calm, serene, 200×200px adsense boxes. They were huge banners, oftentimes popups or interstatial popunders. I think I actually had a windows service running that was specifically devoted to blocking their ads. Not to say that I haven’t signed up for an account. The idea was good and I was in high school at the time. It all would have been wonderful, except that a) the website never got any major traction, and b) I think it became so synonymous with spam that the very idea of using it as a service caused an involuntary acid reflux.

Well, low and behold, in one of my many pseudo-spam mailboxes a few days ago, I started getting messages from classmates.com again. I must say, with some nostalgic melancholy, that they have not changed much. Every few days, I get an e-mail telling me that so and so many people joined my class, that so and so many people viewed my profile, signed my guestbook, etc. Since I’ve been a regular Facebook user for a while, I thought, what the heck – lets see what classmates.com learned from facebook and the rest of the socnetverse.

It turns out they learned nothing. Zip. Nada. It’s still looking like it hasn’t seen an overhaul since ‘97. It still loads forever. It’s still full of advertisements – my “home” page shows two major outside banners – vertical and horizontal skyscrapers. Currently they both show University of Phoenix, which tells me they are not too brightly targeted – why show someone with both undergrad and grad degrees a random ad with… “Bachelor of Science and Psychology”?! Then there’s a square hmmm, maybe 250/300 px ad in top-right corner from SinglesNet. I have no idea if that’s keyed to the fact that my profile shows me as being single. Still, the ads inside correspond to my current IP as opposed to my address, and while that makes me a bit less nervous, it’s also – if I were at all interested – a lot less useful to me since I’d rather see something related to where I live / spend most of my time – i.e. my address, rather than my IP, which indicates at best my temporary location or nothing at all, since I often use a VPN server in the U.S. or an anonymous web proxy.

On top of the externally pointing ads, there is a banner at the bottom pointing to a network of six other sites (either affiliates or member sites is my guess), and two more banners, one asking me to upgrade to a full account for $2.46/month, another asking me to buy a gift. In other words, most of my screen real estate on classmates.com is pure waste. But it only gets better. When I try to click on my guestbook, it tells me it can only be accessed by full members. When I try to see who has viewed my profile, same story… In fact, there seems to be very little I can do with a free profile.

OK, now let’s compare the features of the so called Gold Membership to what I get with Facebook.

• Send and Read Classmates Email (”free” and “delivery guaranteed”, lol) -> messages / group wall on FB
• See photos -> Albums on FB
• Read Profile bios and Q&A -> Profiles on FB
• See who stopped by -> Wall on FB
• Post to message boards -> Group wall + discussions
• Plan reunions and events -> Events on FB

In short then, I get about 4-5 advertisements less on Facebook than I do on classmates.com (and those I do I block with Greasemonkey anyway). I get at worst the same functionality for free (or I should say, for whatever my ad-views + mined data is worth to FB). At best, with an import from my blog, half a dozen or so useful FB apps, etc., I get a lot more. Oh, and before I forget, it’s not really $2.46/month either. It’s $2.46 if you pay $59 / 2 years [sic!], $3.25 / month for 1 year ($39), or $5 / month for 3 months ($15). My current total monthly bill for various services of varying usefulness is about $70 – and I happily dish that out when I truly benefit from such services. But $2-5/month for a service I’d use very lightly, with no mention of the fact that at the very least I wouldn’t see any of these damned advertisements is just pathetic. And to think their primary niche must be poor, recent graduates… It’s no wonder they have failed so miserably.

If classmates.com has any hopes of surviving, it needs a facelift – starting with its business model, ending with its site UI design. In the meantime, I’ll tough it out with Facebook for socializing when face-to-face interaction is not possible. With OpenID gaining a lot of attention lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone designed a fully functional social network around that. Just imagine – full privacy, ownership of content, single sign on to any service… yep, definitely worth dreaming about.