Minti – launches release version 2 (with photos)

Minti (of which I am a co-founder of) has launched it’s version 2 release. The back-end (vibEngine) was nicely transformed into an API platform for licensing ability to roll out more verticals. Minti was given a nice little boost in strengthening the technology platform and got photos as a brand new feature as a present. So on Minti now you can upload photos, make public or private, add your photos to a Minti group, share, post, swap, comment, give two or one thumbs up and link to your photos. We will also be announcing a brand new baby in a weeks time, with it’s homebase in London.

I am really proud of the parents on Minti. It’s becoming a budding, lively and friendly community, one that is centered around advice with a positive social purpose. Sharing advice and experiences is one component that I can see is making a positive impact in the lives of mothers and all types of parents. I do love the fact that parents have access to all different types of social networks and that we find friends on these different networks. I really believe that our lives are interesting and fulfilling, being a member of one won’t cover. For events, I am a member of upcoming.org, for business networking I am on linkedin, for advice on parenting I am on Minti, and other parents may be part of many parenting social networks aligning to their particular offering.

Adding photos was just a fun way of sharing more of those funny, sad or happy moments.

So for what ever parent social network you are on, enjoy and empower.

Roundbook – Family and Friends 2.0

Now many social networking sites for families are starting to pop up fast in this 'family 2.0' space. Standing out from the crowds will be become very difficult, unless you innovate….even slightly. I had a chance to read the founder…Spencer's blog (that is as much as I know about him) and was refreshingly excited.

What is Roundbook?

Well, it has the basic feature set that any social networking site should or rather
must have.

• Blogs
• Upload photos
• See people in your network
• Abiity to report abuse

to name a few…I did also like having an address book and ability to list interests.

So what do I like about 'Roundbook' well, I am more so buzzed about what's coming up with more enhancements on the way.

1. Parent Controls with a designated owner (parent) moderates the invitations of friends but accepting or declining. Not bad! It happens in the real world anyway.

2. Designated helper – This is great when you are trying to manage the older less technical folks, like grandparents. From Spencer's blog…"Rather than owning the account administration, the helper can help manage another user's account. The example here is that my mom isn't too keen on how to invite family members,
so I can invite on her behalf from my account, rather than logging in to her account."

I like it, there is always a family member taking on this role and it makes the site useful for everyone who want the family member to help them (or rather do it for them).

So great that it will have a 'sprinkle of Ajax'…

"Ease of Use in Making Connections

3. User connections / Profile sharing – We are working on AJAX enabled sections that allow for easier social connections. A user will be able to search through their family and friends' networks to find other users to connect to. Users will be able to view each other's public profile, and decide from there if they wish to invite that person to join them."

4. Guest passes – You can invite non members to view your roundbook account.

So my thoughts on this are, would you be able to have this guest account for a certain period of time? Can you only show parts of the content in your Roundbook account?

I know for me I was finding it difficult to find a site on the web where I can just show a photo or album that I wanted a guest to gain access to, but not necessarily see all my other albums that I believed to be family and private.

Maybe there is a site out there? Let me know…

Look forward to seeing this live.

PS. In there also something unique in the pipline too?

My Heritage – Family and Genealogy

At Techuncut Mash Up, I was talking to my friend, Richard Giles about family history…shortly after I got an email asking me to check out a cool "face recogition" tool that matched your picture (in this case Richard's) with a celebrity. Using the face recognition technology tool, it gives you a percentage score of how close the celebrity looks like you based on the facial features in the photo. I won't tell you what was the result. I'll let you go there, upload your own photo and check it out for yourself…

Aside from a cool gimmick, My Heritage has some serious family history capabilities, whilst the functionality is not live, the beta center has info…

Explaining how it works very clearly…

MyHeritage.com automatically learns from every new face it is taught, so after a few examples it will recognize all your family and friends. It can be set to auto-tag faces recognized in high probability.

Associating faces with family trees is great fun. After doing so your family and children can click any face in any photo to see all photos of that person, or the family tree of that person, or their own family relationship with that person.

MyHeritage.com has sophisticated algorithms that facilitate the use of face recognition for genealogy: it recognizes faces in different stages of peoples' lives and uses additional photo meta-data such as dates and places to improve the accuracy of face recognition.

What it offers to provide…

MyHeritage.com builds up a worldwide repository of faces with a special focus on historic photos and genealogy.

You can search for your ancestors in photos submitted by all other MyHeritage users. Who knows what you might find: an unknown photo of your grandfather in his youth? The childhood friends of your great-grandmother? Discover people who look just like you on the other side of their planet. Your lost family relatives? Perhaps!

I will be amazed if this can really happen. It seems to me that finding an unknown photo of your grandfather to be a long shot, a very long shot…but I will find it fun, looking for people that look like me, unless they are a male version look-a-like.

Listen to the CEO, Gil Japhet of My Heritage and find out more…being interviewed by the host of The Gadget Show, Richard Giles from the Podcast Network, click here

Our Story – Our timeline puts it all together

Capture your life's story and the story of your family members. This is a great idea and the first I've seen in attempting to offer timelines for photos and video. OurStory is based on a Freemium model (part free part pay offerings). For the basic subscription that's free, you are able to set up your own timeline with a default set of features. Upgrade and pay; If you want to set up multiple profiles of other family members and timelines. Fantastic for capturing memories from your living histories from your grandpa or grandma.

I did road test the free subscription, and creating a point in the timeline was a little difficult, I didn't realise after the first timeline post, you can add story comments and keep doing so, I was wondering when I could see the timeline. Anyway, I figured it out and after a few posts I got the hang of it.

What's more you can capture your timeline and publish this into a hard copy book or DVD. How cool…

My wishlist would be to implement ajax into the form you use to create your post for the timeline and have the post and comments on one page. So it's one page for one post on the timeline. That would be heaven for time scare people like me and I could add a lot more info at a faster rate.

Another on my wishlist is the ability to be able to upload all my photos (2000 digital + stacks awaiting to be scanned) and be able to categorize them into events like wedding, trip down south, first born etc and then create stories from those categories. It would be a plus within these categories if you could also scroll through a thumbnail slideshow view and rename and place the photos in the right order. That way it's easier to remember the whole story instead of searching your computer folders which may be categorized but are organized within the category in the wrong order (due to uploading from the digital camera and renaming them, which is very common).Then you can click to create a story from your categorized photo library and away you go! What a dream…

Great start OurStory especially for being in Beta and for offering something unique.

Other blogs say…click here

Click on Comments below to hear more from The Founder of OurStory, Andy Halliday

Amiglia – Family Tree + Photo Album

An update on Amiglia. The founders have updated some great things on the site. I also like the new Flickr import feature and I have fallen in love with the video segment that automatically plays on your family homepage, a neat trick…shows a slideshow of the family photos you uploaded of each family member. I am yet to upload all my photos. Which I have an issue with (1500 – 2000 photos) just of family!!!! So I am not sure yet how to go about doing this.

I like the new look on the family trees – must have a play.

I think however, my choice will be to stick with Amiglia.

Great technology Amiglia.

Amiglia – Family Tree + Photo Album

Amiglia what an interesting name, I am getting used to pronouncing it. I have just road tested the site and I must admit I am getting hooked…It's a great geneology site. What? you say… well it's has a cool family tree feature that allows you to build your current family tree and also create extended family members in separate trees. What's unique is that the family tree is dynamic in that you can move your mouse over the tree and it grows and moves in the direction you are looking at, fantastic when you have added in so many family members!!! What's more is each member has a photo and their own profile… It really motivates me to now go in and add in our ancestry and that of other family and extended members.

Photo sharing
As I upload photos to my own album and family, and I am part of other related families or albums my photos also get uploaded automatically to those related families albums. I like this, this is real time sharing.

I am also impressed by the idea of capturing your travels, with photos, animated maps and share this with others. I would see this in the future been a tool that could be syndicated to other travel community sites, like Virtual Tourist. Similar to the ability to import your flickr photos into Amiglia. I will test this out if I travel to the Blogher Conference (a big trip from where I will be coming from)…
Facebook feature is nice, it gives you the ability to look at all your family members, pets etc, some sites do incorporate this at some level, like at myspace.com and at Minti however it's a neat social networking feature that enhances the community feeling.

Don't forget family birthday's
The family calendar is very useful, you won't forget family members birthdays, their kids birthdays (or your pets) and you also have a chronological view of your photos. It's well thought out logic about what families want in organizing their photos and family profiles. In a sense it gives families a greater meaning and uniqueness. We should be proud of our family and linage and be excited to share this time capsule with future generations.

The slideshows are awesome! With music, pictures, tag photos…Amiglia has put a lot of thought into offering meaningful Family 2.0 features. My wishlist would now have to be a look and feel design flavoring Web 2.0 and Social Networking dressings, ability to see the entire famly tree including related trees, ability to move the top position on the tree if it's not correct and add music files to my profile so others can see what music I like or what music my kids like. Another awesome feature on my wishlist would be the ability to create a podcast/video and have access to the parent to parent advice-opedia info, like my Minti articles and introduce Amiglia to other families I have met on Minti. (but it's my wishlist…

I think now, gaining traction and membership is really important for Amiglia and hopefully Family 2.0 sites can work together on this. You are doing great things for making family important and giving it a face!!! Well done!!!