ajaymehta

Such a well-designed site.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm 100% sure you already do :)

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?

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 :)

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!

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.

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

Hold that thought for just a few more days. :)

Just emailed these guys a bug report and got a response in <2 minutes. Props.

That video (while great) is something right out of a Wes Anderson movie.

Garry's an extremely helpful design and product guy, as well as a genuinely nice individual. YC is super lucky to have his full attention.

Startup ideas are so cheap that there are a bunch of resources for finding free ones if you don't think you can come up with one (which I'm sure you could, if you had a good brainstorming session!)

Maybe you could start here at YC's requests for startups: http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html

I wonder why they would reveal this without any announcements of signed deals with TV manufacturers. Seems like killing it off before it even hits the ground -- this is destined for months (if not years) of delay before getting anywhere.

That front-end design is ridiculous. How did you do it?

I believe this approaches what you're looking for: http://namechk.com/

Sounds awesome. I wish you luck, please keep me in the loop! (email in profile)

Sweet! This can only be a good thing. Alexis is awesome (as evidenced by him talking to us for 30 min at 1am for our YC pre-interview.)

Our premise is that Twitter is an amazing place to get human-filtered, socially-relevant content but there's a lot of noise. As of right now, our articles are just listed in reverse chronological order by tweet time, so there's not too much of a relevancy engine in place. However, we want the app to be as relevant as possible.

Basically, we don't have much relevancy secret sauce yet - but we're looking to develop some soon. :)

As of right now the articles are just sorted in reverse chronological order by tweet time. We definitely want to make the sorting more personalized and relevant, so we're 100% open to ideas on how to do that. Have any good ones? :)

Great idea - a simulation would be the best way of understanding the service without any privacy concerns on the user's part.

I see the concern here - as the app is pretty simple right now, we're just using Twitter. We plan to bring in other sources and more personalization, so we'll definitely have Readstream accounts in the near future. But for now, Twitter makes it easy :)

I think this is an amazing point and the main reason we created this. Human curation results in infinitely better content than just reading an RSS feed of the New York Times - and many people use Twitter exactly that way. Readstream just aims to streamline that same content-delivery process.

Not everything that's addictive is necessarily time-wasting! In reasonable doses, I've been learning a ton of interesting stuff just browsing through my linked articles.

Both very good points, and we'll work on adding them in soon.

That's a great question and one that other apps in the same space (Flipboard, Zite) have publicly struggled with.

As this is just a small project for now, we're not too worried about content providers getting mad. But it's definitely something to keep an eye on and any advice you have would be greatly appreciated.