FamilyLeaf (YC W12) Brings Your Kin Together In Its Own Private Social Network | Hacker News Reader

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

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69 pointswesleyzhao34 comments

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!'.

And people keep trying. One aspect that seems to never 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.

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.

Hey - cofounder here :)

So, my parents are divorced. And both re-married. I totally agree that it's weird to share photos of me and my half-brother from my mom's side with the entire family on my dad's side.

And right now, it's really easy to separate them on FamilyLeaf. You just create "a new family" for your distinct branches. I have my mom's, dad's, and stepdad's families all actively sharing - but most importantly, they're separate.

Divorced and fragmented families are deep in our DNA. Our solution right now is to have separate family groups that can share members, but we're open to thinking about different ways to fix this. It's something that's very important to me.

But it sounds like you've thought about this a bit. Please drop me a line at ajay[at]familyleaf[dot]com if you get a chance. Would love to discuss it!

thanks for the reply. glad to hear you guys have thought about this some, and not just thrown up 'another social network'. thanks for the invite to chat too - when I have something intelligent to add/ask, I will do so. :)

I'm 100% sure you already do :)

I've recently notice that Facebook has settled into a way for me to communicate with my family, much more so than my friends or acquaintances, so something like FamilyLeaf makes a lot of sense to me. However, I use Facebook to talk with my family, because they (and everyone) all joined Facebook.

How are you overcoming the chicken/egg problem - getting families to join when I'm imagining that most families already just use a subset of Facebook for similar items?

That's a good question. Facebook does work in some families for sharing, but it's limited. Here's what we've discovered:

Young people like Wesley and I that recently left the nest use Facebook solely for connecting with friends. We may post pictures of us at parties, or other stuff we wouldn't want our parents to see. So we put them on specific restricted lists, or we self-filter everything we put on Facebook.

People like my mom really don't care about Facebook-ing. She only has an account to connect with me and other family members. She doesn't want friends on -- she uses it only for family.

There's a core disconnect there. If I don't feel comfortable adding my mom as a "friend", and she only got Facebook to add me in the first place, there's a problem. With FamilyLeaf, we're earnestly proposing that these are totally different kinds of connections. There are different feelings, filters, and motivations associated with sharing with family. And that requires its own network.

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.

Looking forward to watching this develop further!

Perfect! It's been surprising how intuitive it is to people that Facebook doesn't work for families. It's an unspoken truth - younger people use it to connect with their friends, and many older people are on it strictly for family. It's a core disconnect that Facebook has done a terrible job of bridging.

Let us know when you get a chance to try out the site and share with your global family! My grandparents all the way in Mumbai just sent in some photos this morning. They would have never been able to do that on Facebook - nor would I have accepted their friend request :)

> "We want to bring in older generations"

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.

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.

Will send this over to him, but most of his data is in GEDCOM format... either way, good luck!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM

Hey, wow, that is a brilliant idea. Honestly we haven't thought about that at all -- ancestry.com is of course a giant, but we always viewed it as a bit divorced (no pun intended) from what we're up to with FamilyLeaf.

I'd love your feedback (and your dad's!) on our site. My dad -- largely computer-illiterate -- is actually sharing with us via email by emailing photos to send@familyleaf.com. They automatically aggregate in our online album.

It'd be great to chat about your research on this family space. Shoot me an email? ajayumehta[at]gmail

I had a brief stint working on this particular area in the past (was my first Rails job as well!):

http://web.archive.org/web/20080217022937/http://kinzin.com/

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.

Hope you guys get a better shot and be successful in this space.

Hey - thanks for the comment. Kinzin looks really interesting... I'd actually love to hear more about it and your experience working to bring families closer together online. Think you could drop me an email/tweet?

Unfortunately I don't have much to share, and it is not because I don't want to, because I worked as a part-time Jr. Dev (still at school) back then not knowing anything much other than what I had to do. That and I worked there pre-beta where things were simple and straightforward: let's ship a very simple private network for family to share things.

This was back in early 2007 where everything (share things, social network, social media, online privacy, etc) were still relatively new and gaining steam.

From the very little figment of my memory, all I remember was that Kinzin was trying to create a social private network for family and were trying to monetize a feature that can turn pictures to photo albums to be shared with family members. The rest were still up in the air.

The marketing had probably focused on getting users to use the site first and probably did not explore as far as you mentioned: how to bring families closer online, which I think it could be the biggest value that the FamilyLeaf could offer [for now :), I'm sure there will be more in the future].

But hey, timing is important and who knows it is on your side now (^_^).

Like you, my family is thousands miles away, I see value on sites like FamilyLeaf/Kinzin. Not sure if I would use it once I'm back home though.

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.

Great question! As we get stats we'll let you know :) Feel free to email me and I can let you know how we're faring within our private alpha pre-launch. Also I wouldn't say Family is a "niche" network. People generally reflect and understand that the three most important things in life are work, friends, and family. We want to help bring that third (and most important) graph online.

Hey - thanks for the feedback. I think that you'd only need to take a look at something like LinkedIn to see that when a website taps into a different set of purpose and emotions, there's clearly a need for separation from other networks.

It's pretty clear (ask anyone <25) that Facebook doesn't work for families. And as loved ones move away and get on with the rest of their busy lives (catalogued with products like FB, LI, and now Path/Tumblr/etc), their family is left in the dust. They try to call and email, but it's not meaningful. Older relatives keep scraps of paper or address books with everyone's information - crossed-out phone numbers, outdated addresses to send christmas cards.

We noticed this huge gap in our personal lives after leaving for college a year or two ago. And we hope that FamilyLeaf will find the solution. Family is paramount.

Linkedin in my thoughts big before Facebook, and it is really more of a job board than a networking system.

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.

Definitely a good point. It was a little last-minute :)

Can you think of any other known/notable families you'd like to see on there? I thought one with stock photos might be a little impersonal. But maybe that's the right call.

Kardashians.

I wrote this as a joke then realised that it would probably actually work. Well, maybe once you've moved out of the sphere of tech early adopters. Keep it on ice for now.. then, hell, get them to invest. Just tell them Ashton Kutcher is doing it.

Haha this is hilarious. Also love the idea of using the British Royal Family... though... I hope to be knighted one day.

You sir are brilliant. Would you like to advise our financing efforts?

The British royal family seems both well-known and complicated enough to work well for a demo...

House Stark?

There are lots of well-known sitcoms with extended families in them: Everyone Loves Raymond, The Cosby Show, etc. But if I were you, I'd get some illustrations made of a family (or buy them on istockphoto), name them The Leaf Family and then have copy on the front page like "Meet The Leaf Family! Take a peek inside their FamilyLeaf site and see how they're using it to stay connected."

The Obamas

Agreed, it definitely seemed weird to me. I got the humor, but the average passersby who don't know the movie or bilingual families might not.

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

let's do it11!

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

That's a good point. One of our batchmates actually sent that to us a few weeks after we started working on FamilyLeaf -- I had no idea. Would be really interesting to talk to them about it.

Congrats!

congrats guys!

Thank you Alice! (Our front page design and logo were done by Alice. She's terrific.)

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