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TECHNOLOGY : Forget finder’s fees
Mark Connell said he was frustrated at having to pay Classmates.com to find the e-mail addresses of his friends from the class of 1982 at Ringgold (Ga.) High School. So, in a weekend in 2001, he created a free, interactive Web site for the school. In February, he took Alumz.com national and now has created sites for 800 high schools in 35 states. "Everything you could do, you had to pay for," he said of the 10-year-old Classmates.com. "I had been doing (Web site) development a long time, and I thought, ‘Why make everybody pay?’ So I took a weekend and launched it. I did it out of frustration." On Alumz.com, people can have sites for their high school or college classes, their families or their businesses. Alumni directories, contact information, full biographies, message boards, scheduled chats, class stories, memory boards and reunion news are all free. To access most of the information available at no cost on Alumz.com, Classmates.com charges $5 a month for a three-month membership, $3.25 a month for a one-year membership and $2.46 a month for a two-year membership. The "gold membership" amounts are due in lump sums. Other sites such as classreport.com ask for voluntary contributions. Mr. Connell, who now lives in the Atlanta area, said Classmates.com so dominated the market and had so much advertising that it overwhelmed potential competitors. As of last fall, Classmates.com had 38 million registered members, 10.3 million active monthly accounts and 1.4 million paying subscribers. "Classmates is the 800-pound gorilla in the field," Mr. Connell said. "People do business with them because they have to, but no one really likes them that much." Because of the pioneer site’s size, he figured nobody would want to be listed on a site where there are no names. "They would be justifiably skeptical," he said. So Mr. Connell originally tailored his site only to Ringgold High School. "I built it as a onetrick pony," he said. Eventually, the Ringgold site grew to 1,600 names. That’s when Mr. Connell decided to go national. Blair Peters, a member of the 1979 class at Ringgold, said he learned about Alumz.com from a posting on Classmates.com. "Besides being free to use, I like the way the site is organized," he said in an e-mail from his Greensboro, N.C., home. "I found the classmates site very cumbersome to use. The Alumz site shows only RHS information, so you don’t have to weed through information you don’t care about. ... The site also has a well organized message board that is easy to use and a place for interesting stories." Mr. Peters, 44, said the site also allows him to keep up with reunion plans and see pictures posted from reunions of years other than the year he graduated. He also said the response time on the site is very good. Mr. Connell said he promotes Alumz.com by advertising on Google, which he helps pay for by hosting advertising on his site. He said the advertising on his site currently doesn’t pay for the Google ads, but "it should be paying for itself in a couple of months." He said he is committed to keeping the site free. He said if an outgrowth of the site comes along such as planning reunions or travel, it might be a way to make some money. "But I’m not looking at it as a money-making venture," Mr. Connell said. "If it happens, fine." The Alumz.com founder said he gets requests for 10 to 20 new sites a day and spends 10 to 20 hours a week on the parent site. He said when he expanded Alumz.com to accommodate a national audience, he actually had to make the site less fancy than the Ringgold site. And while he "ramped down the graphics," he built a tool to put individual sites in quickly. He said he began growing the site in the Chattanooga and North Georgia area first "to prove out my software." "When I decided to do other schools, I knew it would take a commitment of time," said Mr. Connell, who is primarily a Web site developer but has worked in Internet ventures involving artificial intelligence, virtual reality, travel, health care and search engines. What he has gotten in return, he said, is thanks from people like his parents, Mickey and Leslie Connell of Ringgold, who have connected with people they haven’t heard from in more than 45 years. He said his father graduated in 1957 from Charlotte (N.C.) Central High School, which closed in 1959. The elder Mr. Connell, 66, said he and others from the class now have a computer chat on the first Tuesday of each month and are trying to plan a time to get together. "It’s been a wonderful experience," he said. "... I’ll give my son a lot of credit. He pushed us to stay on it. I’m glad he did." The younger Mr. Connell said he gets lots of e-mails thanking him for putting Alumz together. "There are lots of stories of people interacting with people they hadn’t seen in a long time," he said. "It’s so rewarding to do that for them." Barbara Milrod Epstein, 59, is a 1963 graduate of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., which has the fastest growing site on Alumz.com, according to Mr. Connell. The New York City area and Florida resident said in an e-mail that she learned of the site through a cousin in Florida who is working on her class’s 50-year reunion. "The site is people friendly, and since it is free... it makes everyone... more interested in joining," she said. "In the short time that I have been involved, I sent out many e-mails to the names of former alum from my school. They in turn told one or more, and it grew by leaps and bounds." Beverly Nixon Eschmann, who is helping plan this week’s 20-year reunion for the Red Bank High School class of 1985, said she has used Alumz.com for about six months. "So far, it’s easier to use (than Classmates.com)," she said. "But I don’t think a lot of people know about it yet." Janice Duff Sloan, a member of the 1974 class at Red Bank, said she learned about Alumz after she and a friend paid $15 for a three-month membership to Classmates. "It was as if our email addresses were being held for ransom," she said in an e-mail from her Marietta, Ga., home. Ms. Sloan, 49, said she has corresponded with eight people, has checked out the biographies and photographs of other classmates and learned of the deaths "too soon" of several classmates. "We've reminisced about some great times, and I swear I think I feel younger because of it," she said. "Those memories don’t seem that long ago, although for me it’s been 31 years." E-mail Clint Cooper at ccooper@timesfreepress.com ON THE WEB To get started go to alumz.com and click on your state. Look for your high school in the alphabetic listing, click, and begin the sign-in process. There are 189 Georgia school registries and 52 registries for Tennessee schools and 54 for Alabama. This story was published Tuesday, July 26, 2005, Copyright Chattanooga Times Free Press
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