PlanetAlumni Merger with Reunion.com

In mid-June 2002, the site hosts of PlanetAlumni.com disseminated an eMail message to all current members (ten from TKG at the time) indicating that they were "closing [their] public Web community" as of Friday, 21 June 2002. The information in their database would not be lost, however, as it was being transferred to Reunion.com. Notice was given that contact would be made "in the coming weeks" by entities representing the new hosts. The latter would include the information necessary to transfer membership. As of the first week of August, there had been no notification via eMail (from Reunion.com) and the information pertaining to TKG has not been migrated.

A copy of the eMail message sent to all existing PlanetAlumni.com registrants on 19 June 2002 has been reproduced for the reference of interested parties. The message indicates that Planet Alumni has dissolved its free, public alumni resource and transferred all of its assets and registrants pertaining to said service to Reunion.com.

Indications for a more timely notification aside, it was not until 26 January 2003 that notification of the consolidation was distributed to former PlanetAlumni registrants. The notification arrived under the guise of a "Registration Activated" thank you message. The missive was simply a copy of the form letter sent to all new registrants of Reunion.com.

Four days later, another message arrived. It was only with this notice that Reunion.com made the official announcement that the PlanetAlumni registration database had been merged with that of their own user base.

Thus, it appears that, following a period of over six months, the consolidation of the PlanetAlumni and Reunion.com subscriber databases has been completed. Will the service and reliability of the latter increase to the standard of that of the former? It seems somewhat unlikely. In fact, the merger seems to have provided the opportunity for the support staff to have removed some of the features from the site. Previously, it was possible to gauge the number of registered alumni for a given institution. Apparently, this is no longer the case. One must now go through each year and tally the listing presented through a time consuming process. In addition, there remains no method of generating a list of all students registered at a given institution. Finally, some of the features still require a paid subscription in order to access (e.g. access to eMail contact and user details beyond that of basic - relatively useless! - information.

Overall, Reunion.com has bungled this opportunity to surpass ClassMates.com in terms of user friendliness and accessibility — two traits that PlanetAlumni possessed. GradFinder.com remains the best bet for an unfettered and versatile resource for alumni reunification.

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created: 28 June 2002
last edited: 17 February 2003