Missed it by that much. Renton business came SO close to becoming billion dollar enterprise

“Missed it by that much!”Renton business Classmates.com sure had the right idea in 1995. They knew there was a market in helping people connect with old friends over the internet. And they knew that with some on-line advertising, sharing of profiles from others already signed on, and word-of-mouth, people would make their site popular.

This Renton business was, in my view, and the view of many others, the first social networking site.

I had signed-up on Classmates.com in it’s early years, nearly a decade before I had heard about Myspace or Facebook. I posted a simple but accurate profile, and read some facts about some old and dear high school friends.

Looking back, I think the only flaw in Classmates.com’s plan, that ultimately prevented them growing into a top-visited, billion-dollar enterprise like Facebook or Myspace, was that they charged you a couple bucks a month if you wanted to actually contact all the high-school chums that you found on their site. I chose not to pay it. I didn’t trust online credit-card transactions very much at the time, and I decided my friends could find me through other public channels…I thought, “why sign up for another recurring cost?”

Thus, when MySpace, Facebook, and Livejournal came on the scene, and offered to link you for free so long as you did not mind ads scrolling around on the side bars, the critical mass flocked to these other sites.

This one business detail, which is much easier seen with 20/20 hindsight, possibly stopped Renton from hatching a huge Social Networking empire to accompany our jet aircraft empire and truck-making empire. Bummer.

Maybe it’s not too late. After all, Classmates.com has shown some staying power…it is one of the few companies that survived the internet bubble burst six years ago. And it sounds like finance experts are still valuing it above $100 million dollars, something anyone could be very proud of.

What do you web-savvy readers think… if Classmates.com revamped their business strategy right now, could they still be a contender for a significant position in the social networking world? Could a Renton start-up still scrap and fight its way to the top of the social networking charts? Or is it simply too late?

Here is the LA Times story on the recent shelving of the sale of Classmates.com stock, with some analysis of the Renton based company.