The Daily Ping

For some reason, recently I’ve had the urge to hunt down people from high school. There are four major alumni sites that I keep an eye on:

• Alumni.Net: Well organized drill-down site, but at my high school, there are only three of us listed. Free registration is required for certain “restricted access,” which I believe means e-mail addresses of your classmates. Also includes colleges as well as separate categories for faculty.
• Gradfinder: Though it’s hard to tell from the front page, you can browse listings without logging in here. To get any information beyond name, though, you need to log in. The nice feature of Gradfinder is that it includes middle schools and elementary schools as well as colleges and high schools. Six people from my class were listed here.
• High School Alumni: The most comprehensive listings of high school alumni, mainly because that’s the only kind of alumni information available. It used to be a very clean site, but now it’s part of Snowball.com, so there’s a lot of extraneous crap surrounding the information. This site has more people listed from my class than any other except for Classmates: 38.
• American Alumni Directory: The least comprehensive of any of these, with only two people from my class. Doesn’t seem to me that this one is a major player. Includes primary and middle schools.
• Classmates: This one’s been around the longest — there are about 45 people registered here. Main problems: a number of duplicate entries, you’re required to sign-in before you can even view names, and you have to pay in order to get e-mail addresses. Thanks to Terry for reminding me of this one below — I had forgotten about it!
• Planet Alumni: Nice looking site, but a bit overloaded with features. Only 4 people from my class.
• My High School’s Alumni Page: My high school has it’s own (lame) web site, but the number of alumni listed (which are entered by hand by the Webmaster) is pretty significant compared to others: 23.

Some of these alumni sites allow you to receive e-mail notifications when someone from your college or high school registers (and in one case, you can specify specific years, allowing you to track the year before your graduation and the year after as well). Out of all of these, I’d have to give High School Alumni the nod, though I am registered at all of them. 🙂 -ram

Posted in Technology