Pioneering social network Friends Reunited is to close down, one of its founders has announced.
The site, launched in 2000 four years before Facebook, is "no longer used for the purpose it was built for", Steve Pankhurst said in an email to staff.
It was hugely popular in the early 2000s when it enabled people to use the internet to reconnect with acquaintances from school. But today it is only used by a "handful of members", Mr Pankhurst said.
The website was bought by broadcaster ITV for £175m in 2005, but it failed to keep up with other social networks, and was sold to comic publisher DC Thompson in 2009 for just £25m .
Mr Pankhurst wrote in a blog post that the company had offered the website back to him a couple of years ago, and he and business partner Jason Porter agreed to run the site for a trial period to see if they could regain its popularity.
However, Mr Pankhurst said their attempts were unsuccessful.
He wrote: "It became clear that most of the actual users coming to the site were using it purely as a messageboard.
"And I also realised that of the more than 10m users registered, a lot had done so over a decade ago and hence their contact details were out of date.
"But importantly - it hasn't covered its costs and like any business this can't continue indefinitely.
"Therefore, whilst it's sad, I believe it's time to move on and put Friends Reunited to bed."
The entrepreneur is now planning to launch a new website called Liife, which will take into account growing concerns around privacy.
It will allow users to plot key moments in their lives, but to only to share them with those who were directly involved rather than a wider audience.
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