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Classmates.com Wants to Resurrect Your Pimply Past


cm-logo.jpgDo you remember that terrible yearbook picture of you, with the feathered hair, two-inch thick Coke bottle glasses and braces? (Don’t even mention the giant forehead zit.) That one? It might be coming back to haunt you.

TechFlash reported this week that Classmates.com has an “ambitious plan” to digitize high-school yearbooks and offer them on the site.

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According to TechFlash, Classmates.com CEO Mark Goldston laid out plans to digitize yearbooks, among other initiatives, as a way to differentiate itself from other social networking sites. The initiative comes after the company reported a nearly 20% profit loss in the fourth-quarter from the previous year. Goldston said the company plans to offer free thumbnail views of the yearbooks, but will charge for full-size views as well as DVD and hard copies.

In addition to yearbook scanning, the company plans on developing apps for both Facebook and the iPhone, as well as getting in on the business of class reunions.

Goldston told TechFlash that the company is looking at a “major reunions initiative that will allow us to be more involved in the planning and selling of tickets, travel-related revenues, and the creation of reunion-specific products and services that we can sell to our users.”

We found ourselves wondering where exactly Classmates.com is going to get all of these yearbooks. Will schools have a collection and willingly hand them over to the site for use? Or will the have to pay some sort of royalty? Even more importantly, will they be scanning in clean, unadulterated copies of yearbooks or are we going to be able to see all the silly, dirty and downright mean things we all wrote when we were in high school?

We know that when many of us graduated high school, we weren’t yet aware of the fact that everything we said and did could end up permanently enshrined on the Internet.

Perhaps our saving grace here is the fact that Classmates gets only a fraction of the traffic of Facebook or Myspace and is largely kept behind a pay wall.

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Don’t Expect a Facebook IPO for a Few Years


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Tuesday, and declined to confirm recent reports that the company had held discussions regarding $150 million in funding (as reported by VentureBeat) and turned down $200 million (as reported by TechCrunch).

Mark Zuckerberg He basically said that Facebook is fine with the money it has. "If there’s an investment to be done on very good terms, we will consider it if for no other reason than to have more buffer if we want to do something in the future," he said at the event.

He also said that he hopes an IPO is in order, but that it won’t happen for a few years according to Reuters. There is no rush on that.

"I know for a lot of companies the IPO is the endpoint or the goal. For us it will be an event on the path to where [we] want to get eventually," Reuters quotes him.

Zuckerberg also mentioned the possibility of the company developing an ad network. "You can see over time us wanting to offer more ways for people to monetize their site and help out with that, and it could be a pretty natural extension for us to do something with ads or a number of other things that we’ve considered."

Speaking of monetization, Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has an interesting post up about how Facebook might one day monetize the open stream API, which was opened up to developers a while back. He lists the following three ways as possibilities:

1. Selling targeting data
2. In-stream virtual currency transactions
3. Selling tools and reports

Yesterday, All Facebook claimed to have data showing that Facebook has surpassed 225 million users. Compete data showed that the network had 104 unique visitors and over 1.6 billion visits in April.

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