PS Remember. Stay connected!

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

“I moved around a lot in my life, and I have lost contact with a lot of people. At the time that I was going to school, there was no Internet, or no cell phones (Yes, I am giving away my age). Because of this platform, I have been able to find friends and former classmates from all stages in my life.” Angelique Morrison

Friendships have always had an important role in our development as individuals. There is no way that life would be as interesting, exciting or emotional without our friends along for the ride. Friends are there to teach us about how other people look at things. They serve as perspective bringers; another set of eyes in which we can look at the world outside of our own viewpoint, our families and our lives.

Friends hold several functions throughout our lives. They can serve as a support team when life gets overwhelming, and through different stages of our lives, our friendships change. We create new ones, and old ones die out. This is just a part of life. But, what happens when we want to reconnect with old friends. This can at times be a daunting experience. A task that one will undertake for several different reasons:

Memories
Meeting up with old friends can be a blast from the past. It can bring back memories of good times that were shared.

Nostalgia
Nostalgia is truly a beautiful feeling. It reminds us of the way things were. It is that feeling you get when you see an old friend and they smile at you. Everything rushes back, and just like that, you are sixteen years old again.

Reconnection
Nothing is like reconnecting with past friends. It allows you to see the world differently. The evolution. The fact that now, you all have to pretend to be adults. You soon discover that you were a part of their lives at one point and they were a part of yours.

I had the amazing opportunity to speak with a husband and wife team who developed a social media platform that takes the stress out of reconnecting with old friends.

“I would encourage anyone, who is looking for someone, who has not signed up for P.S. Remember, to do that right now, and at some point, either you will find that person, or they will find you.” Dwight Morrison 

I wanted to see what was out there when it came to reconnection platforms, so I visited our favourite search portal Google.  I searched “How can I find old classmates for free around the world?” There were a few results, but two stood out: Classmates and Reunion. I am not going to discredit these sites, but I did discover some limitations. With Classmates, and with Reunion, your search is limited to North America. Yes, both platforms have millions of users, but you can only search within the limits of Canada and the United States.

Angelique and Dwight Morrison have taken this search for classmates and friends a step further by developing PS Remember. “The platform was created out of frustration,” Dwight admits to me during our interview. “I was with a company that I felt did not value my abilities. I came home one day and said to Angelique; let’s start our own technology company.” I spoke with Angelique as well, and she admits that frustration was also a driving force for her. “I had moved around a lot in my life, and this was hard for me when it came to making and keeping friends. I had met so may people, but it was hard to stay in contact.”

The development of the platform took them nineteen months in total, eighteen of these months was dedicated solely to data collection. “We started in the United States,” Angelique tells me. “We collected data from all private schools starting from kindergarten, all the way to University. Florida, California, and Texas took the longest. Canada was also difficult because there are a lot of remote places (Yukon Territories, Nunavut). We had to make sure that we included schools that were closed down as well. This took about a month.”

Once they were finished with North America, they began to select countries that had a lot of schools. “India has over a million schools,” Angelique reports. “This was extremely challenging because we didn’t want to leave anyone out. We even did the smaller schools. Of course we had to contend with the government who wanted to know what we wanted this information for. Slowly but surely we gained their trust, and we were able to obtain all of the data needed.”

They then gathered data from Africa, including French speaking countries: Congo-Brazaville, Congo-Kinshasa, France Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion, and all the French-speaking islands. They almost have all the French-speaking countries in Africa, and they are working to get more. At the end of their collection, they had data from over 100 countries worldwide. “No doubt, sometimes it was exhausting,” Angelique admits. “Certain countries required a lot of paperwork before they would release any information to us. They would ask us to send ID. They wanted to know what we were using the data for. We had to prove that we were a real company. Once we got the data, we had to transfer all of that raw information and enter each piece manually to keep the consistency.”

All their hard work paid off, and now they have created a platform that connects students past, present and future. Students can communicate with each other on PS Remember, and what makes this even more fantastic is that the platform is absolutely FREE! All you have to do is register at https://www.psremember.com/, or download the app from Google Play, and you can begin searching for your old friends and classmates.

“Our next goal is to connect with the right investors,” Dwight explains. “Funding is important, but we are not just going to partner with anyone. We want to partner with people who are integral. This is a huge responsibility, and our initiative is to make sure that our users are protected.”