Completely agree, friendsreunited was massive, and if they hadn't taken their eye off the ball, they could have been what facebook is today in the UK.
Their main mistake was to charge users for membership if you wanted to communicate with other users. I believe it was £10/year. Even when facebook came on the scene, they continued charging users.
(Yes, charging users directly, however much 37signals etc trumpet it, is sometimes a very short sighted bad thing to do, particularly when free competitors arrive as they invariably do if you have a reasonably sized market).
So facebook did happen in the UK. Plenty of startups happen in the UK.
That's also one reason classmates.com never caught on in the U.S. They charged to do anything interesting on their site (plus it was ugly).
One thing to take away from all of these examples is that just having an "idea" isn't enough. You have to execute it. If all you needed was an idea, Friendster would've been successful and not MySpace... and then Facebook.
Their main mistake was to charge users for membership if you wanted to communicate with other users. I believe it was £10/year. Even when facebook came on the scene, they continued charging users.
(Yes, charging users directly, however much 37signals etc trumpet it, is sometimes a very short sighted bad thing to do, particularly when free competitors arrive as they invariably do if you have a reasonably sized market).
So facebook did happen in the UK. Plenty of startups happen in the UK.