CairdeScoileCaillte

In the beginning!
During 2001, Áoife (pictured left) had been trying to find some of her lost school friends, and identified there were no websites enabling Irish school and college friends to find and contact each other. Such sites had become very popular, especially in USA and recently in the UK.
So along with friends David & Brian, she set about developing a site for Irish school and college students, but as they talked to friends and associates in other countries, realised that there would be opportunities to extend beyond Ireland.
Our web-designer and chief technical guy started work, and by early 2002 we were testing lostschoolfriends.ie, which went live in March. Whilst our early sign-up of members was slow but steady, we also looked at developing ‘sister’ sites, and by July we had opened lesanciensdelecole.com.fr in France, with Magali in charge, www.alteschulfreunde-online.de being run by Julia in Germany, and www.viejosamigosdelcolegio.eu.com went live in Spain with Laetitia in charge!
Also in June 2002, we were very grateful for a grant from Foras na Gaeilge, which enabled us to complete translation and provide a Gaelic version of lostschoolfriends.ie, - www.cairdescoilecaillte.ie. According to the BBC (no less) we are still the only site of this type available in Irish! Once enrolled, members can view the site in either Irish or English. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/autumn/thebigevent/features6.shtml)
During the summer of 2002, we featured in The Irish Post, and also had a great article in Irish Abroad which described us as "the Best Irish site to help school friends to re-establish contact with each other"
By November, Anna was running vecchicompagnidiscuola.it in Italy, Bhanu had launched universityyaar.com in India, and Ina had introduced oudeschoolvrienden.nl to the Netherlands.
By the end of 2002, we had almost 9,000 members on the Irish site- about half of them now living abroad, with loads in Australia, and USA, and others from China to Bolivia. Orláith joined the team towards the end of the year to handle the increasing workload!
Quite a hectic year!!

2003!
The start of 2003 saw continued steady growth across sites in all 7 countries. We had great feedback from members from all over the world, and responded to many of the ideas that came from members. One was to introduce a 'reunion' facility, so lostschoolfriends from any school or college could help organise and publicise their reunions using the website.
We had received numerous emails from former students of Northern Irish schools and colleges, which had not been included in our initial school and college database- we were delighted to add NI schools and colleges, and these proved to be a most welcome and popular inclusion. The level of demand lead to us having to increase our number of servers, to handle increased activity.
By June we were ready to launch proin-simathities.com in Greece, with Spyros at the helm, and in July, Mel had launched amigosdelaescuela.com.mx in Mexico.
By the end of 2003, our total membership was around 45,000, with around 15,000 Irish members, with India and Holland in joint 2nd place, and a good spread across our other newer sites.

2004
In early 2004 we embarked on an ambitious project to introduce a multi-national chatroom. Our vision was to allow lostschoolfriends from whichever country to chat to each other in whatever language they wished! The result was 'tinychat', which went live in March. Despite one or two minor teething problems, this has been our most popular addition to the lostschoolfriends family of sites. It is great to see members from all around the world (complete with their 'home' flag) swapping stories and experiences- often in a wide variety of languages.
Our International expansion continued with Pawel launching szkolnikoledzy.pl in Poland in June, at the same time as our most ambitious translation and technically demanding opening of dososeiomitsukeyo.com by Shige in Japan.
2004 also saw the completion of our adopted charity links. By the very nature of our sites- allowing people to find lost friends, we thought it appropriate to support charities in as many countries as possible whose mission was to enable lost and missing family and friends to locate and/or contact each other. Most sites now have links to ‘missing persons’ or similar websites.
2004 had seen further steady growth with France showing spectacular growth to join Ireland in the lead, with Holland, India and Mexico a short distance behind. We now had around 180,000 members worldwide, and over 236,000 schools and colleges on our database. Our ‘International Associates’ continued to proved great support to all our sites, handling member queries and adding and updating schools and colleges.

2005- and beyond!
Who mentioned a period of consolidation??
The success of the International family of sites and in particular ‘tinychat’ has placed great pressure on our servers, and so in March we are anticipating a switch to servers with over twice the current capacity.
We have been working on various improvements to ‘tinychat’ and these are currently being tested, and will launch around March. We continue to see steady, and often spectacular growth in our member numbers, and our priority is to maintain the availability and integrity of all the sites for the benefit of our members. We continue to monitor usage and activity closely, and take early action to remove anyone abusing the service.
All our sites remain totally free- all we ask is for members to let their friends, relatives, colleagues etc know about us through the ‘tell-a-friend’ link, and to support the adverts which appear on some of our sites.