Early on Classmates.com had as pretty much their sole value proposition that they'd actually input insane numbers of class rosters and set up pages for the schools as gathering points. The social network side of things was actually more successful than I would have thought for a long time, but Facebook has pretty much eaten their lunch on that side so they're back to needing to be a good contact method. They're not.
Worse, they're getting creepier. They'd already collapsed into a nearly pure scam by 2010 or so, but apparently they're doing some very creepy stuff with their data sources now. I had to work with them trying to connect another site (ick) and never had an account that had both have my real name and high school (in fact my school was only in test data), but at some point in the last few years they connected the two and are trying to convince me that people are looking for me under a name they'd never know. I guess the inevitable devolution of something selling getting back in contact is selling the idea of contact without the reality.
Worse, they're getting creepier. They'd already collapsed into a nearly pure scam by 2010 or so, but apparently they're doing some very creepy stuff with their data sources now. I had to work with them trying to connect another site (ick) and never had an account that had both have my real name and high school (in fact my school was only in test data), but at some point in the last few years they connected the two and are trying to convince me that people are looking for me under a name they'd never know. I guess the inevitable devolution of something selling getting back in contact is selling the idea of contact without the reality.