About Faces
Faces.com was originally a social network that dates back to the start of 2004. It was originally owned by an Australian company although its members were mainly from the US. When it fell into financial difficulty it was purchased by Symbios Group in 2008 with over 300,000 members mainly by chance. On reading a Tech Crunch article about it closing Martin Montague walked over to the fax machine and sent a random hand scribbled fax asking to buy the assets. To everyone's surprise a deal was concluded in the following weeks that included all of the intellectual property as well as the members, and one of the best domain names on the net.
At around the same time, the company purchased the once prominent UK based social network face-pic.com. At its peak, face-pic had over 2.5 Million world wide members but the majority were based in the UK and US. The site had closed down in lieu of difficult trading conditions, and all the servers had been scheduled to be wiped clean by the hosts in a matter of hours of the discussions beginning. A deal was struck just in time to save the data.
Symbios had very little recourse to do any major development work to these already ailing sites after acquisition. As a result a botched attempt at a re launch on the faces.com site in 2009 was a complete disaster. Technically nothing ever seemed to work properly and even minor bugs were often proving impossible to fix because of the site architecture. It quickly fell out of favor with its members and further technical development was abandoned in early 2010 on this version of the site.
In early 2011 it was decided to redevelop the faces site and also use the member base from face-pic. Advertising had been a huge restriction on content previously so it was decided to remove all the advertising and start with a blank canvas aimed at fun loving over 18s. As ideas were kicked around for what people really wanted, it became clear that a lot of our members wanted to have great nights out, look for new friends, find a relationship or have no strings attached fun rather than just keeping in touch with existing friends. So we decided to break the taboo in some of these areas and build a site delivering exactly what the members wanted. We also wanted to encourage a new bond between our members like a “brotherhood” and the idea developed in a way that let the more popular members have the option to join our online social fraternity as a great way of increasing their social circles on and off the site.
We hope that you enjoy your stay here and remember what they say “the third time's the charm”.