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Picking Facebook over the phone directory for finding my old college roommate | Lost Connections - Rigidtalk

leep33•3mo ago

Picking Facebook over the phone directory for finding my old college roommate

I had to decide between running a people search on one of those paid sites or just scrolling Facebook. Spent $19 on a site that gave me a dead end, then tried Facebook and found him in 10 minutes because he posted about his band playing in Cleveland. I typed his name with the college we went to in 2012 and his profile popped right up. Has anyone else had better luck with social media than those paid search things?

2 comments

2 Comments

davidh883mo ago

So you paid 19 bucks for a dead end and Facebook did it for free? That's about right. Those paid sites are ALWAYS a ripoff they just scrape public info and charge you for it. I swear half the time they give you an address for someone who died in 2006. Facebook might be a privacy nightmare but at least it actually WORKS when you need to find someone from 12 years ago who still posts about their garage band. Your roommate probably has a profile pic of him holding a guitar and a beer from 2014 so it was probably easy to spot.

williamschmidt3mo ago

I mean, you're not wrong about the paid sites being kinda sketchy most of the time, but I gotta push back a little on the Facebook thing actually working. I've tried finding people from like 2012 on there and half the profiles are either inactive or locked down so tight you can't see anything. Plus their search is terrible now compared to what it used to be. Like I tried finding an old coworker last month and I kept getting pages for random Facebook groups instead of actual people. Maybe it's just me but I think people forget how hard it is to find someone when they've changed their name or just stopped posting entirely.