Features Of The Ideal Family Social Network

Almost everyone I know is sharing photos online with family, and some more web savvy families have full groups set up online to correspond with other family members across the world.

Over the last few weeks, I have come across several social networks aimed at helping families to communicate with one another. The solutions range from slick interfaces to creating your family tree (OurStory.com). There are fairly good services for creating your family website (

Family Email Database - Probably one of the most frequently used and needed applications of a family social network would be a way to email all family or subsets of family. It would have all the grouping and webmail features you would expect, but also integrate to popular online email programs and allow you to segment family into the tiers to determine who gets particular emails. Finally, the ability to import email lists and synch between programs would be vital.

Recommendation Engine - People have always recommended products to one another and family members can be powerful voices to influence purchasing decisions. Added to that, everyone has an Uncle that is good with cars, or a cousin who is a professional photographer. Harnessing these expertises, the family social network would have a feature where people could create pages or recommendations about products or areas that they are passionate about. This could also create the revenue model for the site, as people recommending products in an authentic environment like this is exactly the type of impression advertisers are dying to pay for.