Into the Void

Thanks to the recent explosive growth of Social Networking Sites (SNS’s) such as MySpace and Facebook, it seems like high school reunions are quickly becoming a thing of the past. All of my friends (who went to several different high schools) say there is no official reunion for their class due to “lack of interest” or something along those lines.  With everything the Internet has to offer, who really needs to meet in person anymore, right?…

The problem is that for graduates of big classes (> 200 students, or in my case about 450) it can be difficult and time-consuming to find a significant number of ex-classmates. One reason for this is that the profiles are scattered across different SNS’s (such as MySpace and Facebook), and another is that most people do not provide information about which high school they attended. So last week I decided to address this problem by creating a virtual reunion Website for my High School class. I parked it at http://www.etherice.com/oakpark/.

The first thing you’ll notice is that I added lots of memorabilia to draw in ex-classmates, including scans of the yearbook and class photo. The second thing you’ll notice is that I don’t ask for any information from the user EXCEPT for their SNS URLs. I could have asked everyone to post pictures, bios, interests, hobbies, etc…. but everyone has done that already, and as a computer science guy I hate redundancy!… so people post their URLs and that’s it… that way everyone can just update their SNS profiles and not have to worry about replicating those changes somewhere else.  (Plus, it really simplifies the system!)

The site has been up for a few days and over 30 classmates have already signed up… not bad. I expect for that number to reach about 50 in the next month. My goal is to locate half the class (over 200), but that’s probably a little optimistic. We’ll see how this experiment turns out.