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First NZ Friend Find Service Launches Tomorrow

New Zealanders around the globe will be able to locate old schoolmates and work colleagues, thanks to a new website being officially launched tomorrow.

Oldfriends.co.nz will be New Zealand’s first broad-based person search engine and has been created by the same team that made trademe.co.nz, the country’s most visited transactional web site.

The unique service is free and reunites kiwis with lost friends from school, university, work and other organizations such as sports clubs and church groups.

The model has had spectacular success overseas. A similar site in the UK that focuses on schools last year grew to four million registered users in months and drew more than 50% of the UK’s total web-traffic.

Oldfriends.co.nz managing director Jessi Morgan, said a pre-production test of the site suggests that New Zealanders have a real thirst to find whatever happened to that person you kissed behind the bike sheds.

“Our pre-production pilot saw Oldfriends.co.nz gain over 5,000 registered members in just one week,” she said.

“We’ve now refined the service and will launch it internationally tomorrow.”

OldFriends offers an email notification service that updates members when other people join their old schools and workplaces.

The site is free, and Trade Me says it has no current plans for charging for Oldfriends.co.nz. It hopes the site will increase traffic to its online auction and dating sites, www.trademe.co.nz and www.findsomeone.co.nz.

Trade Me is a New Zealand whiz kid success story. Started three years ago in 20 year old Sam Morgan’s bedroom, it has since grown into a profitable business and is today the most popular transactional site in New Zealand with nearly 800,000 page views per day.
Ends.

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