Serendipity35

MyYearbook.com is the social networking site getting a lot of buzz. It comes from the suburban Montgomery Township, New Jersey brains of the brother & sister team of Dave (now a frosh at U of Colorado) and Catherine Cook (high school senior), who wanted to buzz past the traditional yearbook.

Cook #3 is their 27 year old brother, Internet entrepreneur Geoff Cook. While at Harvard, Geoff founded EssayEdge.com and ResumeEdge.com which he sold in 2002 for nearly $10 million - so he knows what to tell his younger sibs about the business (and he kicked in $250K to start the site rolling).

• MediaMetrix calls them the youngest social networking site on the Internet, and the only site growing faster than competitor MySpace (1.5 million members in 10 months)
• MediaMatrix ranks myYearbook.com as the 5th top-gaining Web property overall
• The site attracted more than four million visitors in June 2006.
• Launched in April 2005 for use by the students at just one suburban high school
• the site went wide August 2005
• the site adds 5,000 new members each day
• 75% of its new members are in the United States
• this past July they hit one million members

Some history on the site, from the site:

It all started during Spring Break 2005, flipping through a yearbook in my room and realizing it sucked. This is 2005 - why the hell is anyone buying yearbooks anymore?

We wanted more than the typical stuff -- superlatives, autographs, will, pictures -- although those had to be there too. What would make this site different -- and loved -- is it would be full of the people you know and meet in real life everyday. And it would go with you your whole life. It was real life on the Internet.

Then we realized it could be more.

It could reinvent real life. It could make real life better. Making it easier to meet the people you see every day. Making it easier to approach the cute girl in a different class. Making it easier to find out who else shares your likes, dislikes, favorite movies, music, Chinese food place, ...Catherine wrote the name down on her notebook, put smiley faces in the "O's." myYearbook was born.

It wasn't long before we realized this was bigger than just high school or just college. This would be the best social networking site in history, if we could figure out what we were doing.

Let's face it, friendster gets boring, myspace is creepy, and classmates is a rip off. myYearbook would be the only community of people worth going to -- full of people you meet or used to meet everyday, the people you might actually be friends with, bump into, date, knock their books down, or marry. It would have every high school, every college, every graduate school, every summer program, every employer, everyone.

And it would connect everyone to everyone like never before.

And it would have no ads.

This is about building a site you want to use the rest of your life. It's about making myYearbook something that will be around billions of years from now.

And by the way, myYearbook will always be free. We're never going to even consider charging. Why? Because it's against everything we stand for. This only works if everyone loves the site as much as we do and wants to make this site the coolest way of hanging out online and the best way to find more about the people you see everyday in real life.

Geoff, 27, is our older brother/investor/alcohol buyer. You might call him: "smart money." Geoff is a freak. He got every question right on the SATs. He went to Harvard, made a silly claim in a newspaper at age 20 about being a millionaire by age 24, and then did it. He started a multi-million dollar business at school, sold it to an evil multinational, and now bounces around, and throws money at us when we need it. Still, 27 is old. I'm glad I'm not 27.

Did I join? Of course. How else can you review a site and stay on top of web 2.0?