Last year I ranted about how Classmates.com nickels-and-dimes its users. While every other social networking site (at least that I've seen) doesn't charge its members to read messages, Classmates.com does. If you have a free membership (as I did), and some long lost high school friend decides to contact you, you can't read their message until you pay up for a "gold membership." As if. After thinking about it, I decided to cancel my membership. Here is where it gets really good. While there appeared to be an online option for canceling, I kept getting an "internal service error." I tried canceling online a few times. I was successful only after I e-mailing a representative. However, "gold members" can only cancel by asking the Classmates customer service team to do it.
To me, none of these policies make Classmates.com customer friendly, or easy to use. I contacted Classmates' media representative in November for comment, but I have not received a response. To top it off, I received spam from the company today. Nowhere in the e-mail did the company give an option to "unsubscribe." Argh!
I've never been a fan of Classmates.com. It seems the service is more interested in making a quick buck than in really developing an online community of users. Yes, I posted a profile when Classmates first got started, but since then I've shunned the site because of the way it nickels and dimes.
Several months ago I received a notification that someone I knew in junior high school had sent me a message. Since I'm always interested in blasts from the past, I clicked over to read the message. But then Classmates told me I had to pay to read it. Pay to read a message? I'm sorry, (actually I'm not) but that's just ridiculous. I can understand having to pay to send a message (like buying a stamp) but I refuse to pay even $15 (the cheapest package available) simply to see what my friend had to say. So sadly, he lost out and even though I received several notices that the message was waiting for me, it remains unopened to this day. Then today I received another notice telling me someone had viewed my profile. Again, I tried clicking over to see who it was but again I was told I needed to upgrade to a paying member. I guess you do get what you pay for.
It's unfortunate that as one of the original social networking sites, Classmates charges for so many of its features. Web sites such as Friendster (poor forgotten Friendster), MySpace, and LinkedIn don't charge for those services, so why does Classmates? It just doesn't make sense, it's not customer friendly and it's wrong.
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