Yep, she sure is! Lynda, the nerdiest girl in your class who you never talked to, is now a online banner ad cover girl.

Who would have known?

Lynda tempts our voyeuristic curiosity to see what became of our former classmates. Especially those lurid nerd-to-glamour girl or valedictorian-to-serial killer sort of 180-degree ironies - stuff that could bring us a quick rush of emotional gratification.

Classmates.com was a really good idea when it started back in 1995. The internet was just taking off among the upper-class early adopter segment. The pay-for-access e-mail database model was fairly viable.

But now, with all the competition from free social networking sites, I suspect it’s a million times harder for Classmates to get people to pay for membership. Their business model got eclipsed by new technology. And so did a lot of the old information in their database - like expired Hotmail addresses, or Geocities and Tripod pages from your classmates who logged into once back in ‘98.

I have contacted several of my former classmates, for free, thanks to MySpace. It’s been a brief hoot to connect, compare and see what they’re up to. (Some are in Hollywood, some are on Madison Avenue, and some are in rehab.)

But in many cases, the things we had common over a decade ago have drifted apart. I’m sure if we met in-person it would be a blast, but the online conversations feel a bit distant and forced.

My best memories of the good ol’ days are the analog ones. Like calling up old friends. Or going through the old seventies editions of my high school yearbooks they kept in our school library and looking at the giant afros.

What if I signed up at Classmates.com in order to digitally reconnect with Lynda, the shy nerd girl I never talked to who is now a banner ad model? We’d have so little to talk about, it would hurt to even try.

I think I’ll pass.