StayFriends.de
Stay Friends is a website for finding and managing school friends. She claims to be with more than 14 million entries in more than 70,000 schools and 11,000 organized on their platform class meetings (as of February 24, 2014) is the leading such Tracing Service in Germany. He is free in its basic version; need to use the full function range are completed a paid Gold membership, which will be extended automatically.
Business
Based in Erlangen StayFriends GmbH runs the online platform StayFriends.de since August 2002. The Managing Director is the co-founder of the site, Michel Lindenberg.
Since January 2004, the StayFriends GmbH is a wholly owned subsidiary of Classmates Online from Renton, United States, operator of the online community classmates.com. , Which in turn is a subsidiary of the U.S. Internet company United Online.
With the same software platform StayFriends GmbH operates more sister sites in Europe:
- Swedish sister site StayFriends.se, until March 2005 Klasstraffen.se,
- The French equivalent trombi.com
- Stayfriends.at the Austrian platform
- The Swiss version stayfriends.ch, until April 2009 Klassenfreunde.ch,
Principle of operation
StayFriends gives the user the opportunity to be entered in a virtual version of his former school name and graduation year. Schools are sorted by state, city and school type, and there is the opportunity to enroll at several schools. A search in the database for retrieval of old friends can be a name, a place or a school.
While some features are free to use, for example to find old friends, organizing class reunion or looking at class photos, many are only available after the except payment of an annual subscription. So is not it possible a simple contact between the base version users.
The premium features include the full message exchange with all the members and to view all photos and profile information. Unlimited messaging is, in this case: News are read-only when one is of the two communicators Gold Member. Even the viewing of poetry albums (Guestbook) ( even of one's own ), and read the "own side " of others is dependent on the Gold membership.
Privacy Policy
In StayFriends the application with the real names are. Therefore, the exchange of information about a platform private messaging system takes place. Your own e- mail address is only visible to other users when you explicitly telling it as part of the message exchange. For non-members entries in search engines such as Google are visible, which first and last name, year of retirement and the type and name of school attended may appear in the search results. Although the publication of such data may be objected, however, there may be significant delays in distances from the index of a search engine, or the correction of a recorded information there.
The Stiftung Warentest "Significant deficiencies " provided in its test " Social Networks " ( May 2010 edition ) Stay Friends with an initial rating. This assessment was based primarily on deficiencies in data security and protection of minors. The handling of user data was classified as good. Defects in the Conditions were no.