FamilyLeaf (YC W12) Brings Your Kin Together In Its Own Private Social Network

I spoke with some people at ning early on (2006? 2007?) and had suggested that they offer a version catering to families. That was met with some lukewarm reception, but I'd thought 'social networks for families going to be big!'.<p>And people keep trying. One aspect that seems to <i>never</i> get brought up is divorced families. Many may not want people on one side of the family or the other to be seeing certain pics or talking to others. Having statuses read by person X mentioning person Y may not be the best thing to do.<p>So... introduce privacy controls? It's confusing enough for most people just to enforce a couple of rules. Trying to codify the weird world of divorce families' feelings in to a web interface will be problematic. Sure, people can just 'get over it' and 'grow up', or they can be told to, but it's not always so easy.

I dig the idea. Facebook has definitely broken down from me with trying to selectively share certain statuses and photos across friends and family of different backgrounds. With two small kids we love to share photos with our family members overseas, but censoring everything else we say for relevancy is a challenge. Circles were a good idea, but still too much work IMO.<p>Looking forward to watching this develop further!

&#62; "We want to bring in older generations"<p>As my father ages, he seems to get more interested in our family history and often sends mass emails about new connections he finds on ancestry.com.<p>I've always thought that the data from ancestry.com would be a great way to seed a new social network. It would attract a motivated, older crowd and they would add profiles for the younger generations too. Previously looked into this and genealogical data actually has a standardized format called GEDCOM[1]. It might be a useful way for users to quickly populate their pages on FamilyLeaf.<p>Will send this over to him, but most of his data is in GEDCOM format... either way, good luck!<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM</a>

I had a brief stint working on this particular area in the past (was my first Rails job as well!):<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080217022937/http://kinzin.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20080217022937/http://kinzin.com/</a><p>Didn't make it, pivoted a few times. Not sure what the status right now. Unsure what the challenges were since I didn't get involve much in the business/marketing aspect of it.<p>Hope you guys get a better shot and be successful in this space.

On that note, does someone know of any good statistics that show how well "niche" social networks fare in the light of the growth of the general purpose monster Facebook? I like very specific-purposed social networks, but I was wondering what the general traction of those networks is, or even what the average number of social networks per user is. I assume we techies are on many, but I feel like the general public barely goes beyond Facebook.

The Corleone family in the demo account is cute, but it's not the greatest way of demoing what it would look like for a real family to use it. It's also a dramatic shift in tone from the logo, which is more friendly, approachable and peaceful.

Awesome work! Let's get together when you're up in SF. :D Congrats!

This is just like the original idea for Github, which was actually a social network for families called FamSpam.

Congrats!

congrats guys!