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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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