As recently as 2005, ITV shelled out USD250 million for Friends Reunited. Unfortunately for ITV and subsequent owners DC Thomson, the rest of the social networking world then exploded with new innovation, photo-sharing, selfy-videos, and thumb-swiped connecting and adjoining, etc.  Friends Reunited was left by the road-side in the rain while the rest sped past.  

But there was something quaintly wonderful about Friends Reunited; with its central premise: re-connect with people you used to know, rather than the more needy millennial angst of connect with people you want to know now.

Today over 1.5 billion users scan Facebook, we rate our friend's hazy photos of their pets and over 400 million of us navigate our professional network, agonising over our profile picture on Linked-In.  Forget the resume, or the depth of your professional experience, where did you get that head-shot done?  Meanwhile, our kids fret over their follower numbers on Instagram and Snapchat and look unimpressed at our meagre 82 followers on Twitter.  

Linked-In though seems to have done a favour for the nostalgia junkies amongst us, but it has also given a terrific research tool out to the world, for free.  Those of you interested in the career destinations of your University Alumni are likely to find Linked-In's smart Education pages a real boon.  If you join your University Group for example (I think pretty much are all open groups) you can now search that University by graduation class, check-out their employers, where they live, etc.   You can work out your connectedness to a class thirty years ago and assess their, ahem, degree of separation from you and one another today.  

If you were to try to purchase a CRM with the functionality to do this it would cost a fortune and have all kinds of data validity issues (not to mention raise data protection questions).  But here it is on Linked-In.  User generated.  For free.  Spookier still, you can "pretend" to have gone to a much more prestigious University.  For example. if you are considering investing in an MBA at a major business School, you can instantly see [with some marginal scope for sampling error, or social fibbing] where you are likely to end up working.  

Should I be surprised that 88 current employees of Apple [who are on Linked-In] went to Harvard Business School, or that over a 1,000 of their classmates [who are on Linked-In] are still hunched over assignments at McKinsey, Bain and BCG?  But there they are.  A click or two later and you can discover pretty much who they are, where they studied undergrad and where in the world they now live.  I am sure there brighter minds than mine who can find more substantive ways of mining the data, creating statistics or developing a useful analysis or hypothesis.  Headhunters anyone?  Maybe you already have?

In a realm of paid-for professional Google Apps and MSoft One Drives that charge for services, the Education section on Linked-In is rather extraordinary.  You can't access it all of it for free (particularly on individual searches) but I would not be surprised if the whole platform migrates very soon to a Premium option only.  

Check it out while you can.