Find A Kiwi Spreads Its Wings Overseas

Find A Kiwi Spreads Its Wings Overseas

Renamed Friends Reunited its now 40 times bigger and connects people across the globe

Reunion website, Find a Kiwi has been renamed Friends Reunited as its 300,000 members are now able to search for friends from a database of over 11 million people in the UK, and soon to be added Australia and South Africa.

The UK internet phenomenon Friends Reunited, acquired Find a Kiwi in March 2003 and has added various new services to the site since then, including a popular dating service and ancestry site Genes Reunited, which now has over 27 million names listed worldwide.

The introduction of the one global database will further enhance the service for New Zealand members, especially as over 200,000 nationals were born in the UK and over 450,000 Kiwis now live in Australia.

According to the British High Commission in New Zealand, around 5,000 young Kiwis take off to live in the UK every year for what is commonly known as the "overseas experience" and as many as 70 percent of New Zealanders qualify for a UK passport.

Jackie Gower, regional manager of Friends Reunited for New Zealand, said: “It’s a known fact that Kiwis are a well travelled bunch and we wanted to enable members to make contact with their friends around the globe. It made sense to change our name to Friends Reunited at this time as the site is now about finding old friends of any nationality.”

Michael Murphy, chief executive of Friends Reunited, said: “Our aim is to reunite friends from all over the world, concentrating initially on English speaking countries. This is the first step and over the coming months we’ll be adding an Australian and South African service.”

Friends Reunited New Zealand can be found at www.friendsreunited.co.nz.

Ends

NOTES TO THE EDITOR

About Friends Reunited

Founded by North London based husband and wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst and their business partner Jason Porter, Friends Reunited was launched in July 2000 so that people could get in contact with their old school friends. A combination of word of mouth and immense media attention has propelled the site to phenomenon status, expanding beyond the school friends proposition to include workplaces, teams/clubs and streets. The site has over 11 million members, representing 42% of the adult internet population in the UK.

One global database

There will be no change to how members access the service:

Same login details - email and password

Same profile notes – what they’ve written about themselves

Same places - the schools, universities and other places they’ve listed their name at.

New improvements:

New Message Centre - any contacts sent or received will be stored securely in a new, password protected message centre. When a member receives a message an email alert is sent, but the actual message will be held on the site. This means there’s no longer any danger of messages from old friends not getting through or getting lost when somebody changes their email address.

Access to a bigger database of places and people - from today members can search and browse people and places in New Zealand, the UK and Ireland and soon Australia and South Africa

Friends Reunited will also be expanding the places members can find old friends from, by adding workplaces and other lists.

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