Re:Competition is nice, but . . . (Score 1)

You're completely right. My brother and I developed a free version of classmates.com in about a month. The innovative part that we included is that it's completely free, supported by Google Ads of course. You can find it at highschoolforever.com and it's actually pretty well done. There are blogs, forums, pictures, everything.

The only reason I bring this up is to show how simple some of those websites out there really are. And yet people pay $30/year for classmates when there are services like ours that are free.

The difference - classmates.com made their site first. They came up with the idea. They will always have more traffic than us. We have a couple classes that are really using the site well, like this one:
 
  Class of 1986 of Minico High School
 
And their class list:
 
  Class list

It's easy to duplicate, and I'll be the first to admit that. It's harder when it comes to inventing the idea yourself.