They thought they had lost each other forever – Alf Norkfest and Betty Relish were members of Friends Reunited, a deserted, barren website that was popular back in the early 1990s. Now in their 70s, the pair were reunited on friendsreunitedreunited.com, a site for long lost Friends Reunited contacts.

“It’s a miracle,” beamed Norkfest. “I remember the good old days of going on Friends Reunited and seeing that there were people actually there. That’s when I got back with Betty, my childhood sweetheart. Oh, they were happy days, the 90s. We’d log on, and send each other these things they called e-mails – do you remember them?”

“Oh, those joyous days of the Internet when it was all new and fresh, and you had that dialling tone with the beeps, not any more, it’s all Myspace and Beebo and pages load instantly. I don’t like it any more.”

“Even in the late ’90s, I’d hang around on Friends Reunited, but there was nobody around. It was like going to school on a Sunday – you know there’s no one around, but you still shout down the corridor just to check.”

While everyone else left Friends Reunited, Alf Norkfest visited the site on a daily basis in the hope of finding Betty again, but to no avail. “She was on Facebook, wasn’t she,” he mused, with a hint of regret. “I never thought of going on there.”

The two met up again on friendsreunitedreunited.com, the brainchild of Dick Wadde. He told the Daily Shame: “I always wondered what happened to the people from Friends Reunited, and thought it would be great to reunite them, so they could share in reminiscences about how, for example, the site tried to charge people £5 for sending messages, or if they remember any of those adverts that took ten minutes to load.”

“Unfortunately, the site hasn’t been so popular, only five people have signed up so far.”

Wadde is joining a tidal wave of web developers cashing in on 90s nostalgia, and claims that his next project is to “bring back the spinning .gif file” on a website that contains nothing but text in Comic Sans.