Family intranet startup - would love your feedback | Hacker News Reader

Family intranet startup - would love your feedback

3 pointsaasarava4 comments

My partners and I are building a service that lets any family set up a family intranet site. We've just put up a beta and would love to get your honest feedback (even the brutal stuff.)

http://kinverge.com/

Registration is required, but it's just an email and password. (The site lets you upload photos and other content, and lets you invite others to your group, so it's easier to check it out within your own user account rather than using a single generic test account.)

Really interested to hear your input and advice. The idea for the site grew out of our frustration with not being able to keep track of family information -- photos, birthdays, giftlists, announcements, etc. -- all in one place. We also wanted to make that place so easy to use that even our non-tech-savvy family members can participate.

What do you think? What's working for you, and what should we be doing better/differently in your opinion?

I would really like to see a demo before signing up, but I think a family based social network is a phenomenal ideaf or the very reason you said: keeping track of things going on with detached families.

Maybe detached isn't the right word, but I know in my case, family spread across the US and even Europe, with some members in Iraq I think this is GREAT.

Thanks! Glad you like the idea. (And good point about seeing a demo first -- we definitely want to add something along those lines as a next step.)

It's a nice idea: How is it better than using Geni.com?

While Geni does have family-oriented tools, it focuses first on genealogy. The implicit "goal" is to build the largest possible family tree, and presumably to use its social networking features to learn about and create new relationships with distant relatives on that tree. While Geni does a great job of it, there are a lot of families that don't have time or interest in genealogy, and are instead just looking for a simple way to stay in touch with a core group.

So we're focusing instead on immediate families and other closely-connected groups that need a simple way to share and manage information among existing members. They're looking to save time, rather than pick up a new set of information to manage (family tree). That's why I say Kinverge is more of a family intranet site than a social network.

To think of it another way, the Geni social graph is a traditional mesh, while Kinverge's is formed of circles that touch at points where members belong to multiple groups (your family group and your in-laws' family group, etc.). You could make Geni work that way, but it would require changing a lot of the default privacy settings, which non-tech-savvy family members have a hard time doing.

Thanks, keep the feedback coming! Much appreciated.

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