Private and Simple Family Sharing on Rootsy.com - Eastman's ...

Rootsy.com is a new, start-up web site that is designed as a private place to share your family stories and connect with the people you care about most. The site allows you: 1) build your family tree, so you can map out your family relationships and explore your heritage, and 2) share photos, videos and stories that your family will enjoy. Everything on Rootsy is private, so only your family can see what?s happening in the network.

Rootsy.com is not a genealogy site to compete with other sites on the Internet. You won't want to use it to list your ancestors back ten generations and it doesn't provide places for source citations and there are no fancy charts. Instead, Rootsy.com is designed as a gathering place for your living relatives who would like to keep in touch with each other. One page on the web site states, "Our goal is to help people strengthen their bonds with close family as well as reconnect with distant relatives. We believe that family is the most beautiful thing on earth." In other words, Rootsy.com is a bit of a social networking site for your family.

The web site allows you to build family trees, restricting it to names, photos, and only basic facts about each person. Then any family member can share photos, videos, text files, or whatever they wish.

To create a family space on Rootsy.com, you first add yourself to a new family tree. Then you can add a spouse, sibling, parent or child. When you add this person to your digital tree, you can invite them to the network by entering their email address. Once they join, they can invite other family members to Rootsy, too and help your grow the tree, or you can add all the family members yourself. The person who starts the tree is the administrator, but down the road Rootsy will add functionality for other people to manage the tree. Any family member can post or share something with the group.

Users will receive notifications when major family events occur, and all this information is kept private. No one else outside your family tree can view what you post on Rootsy.

Rootsy.com has a rather strong privacy policy that is similar to that of most other genealogy web sites. All information uploaded remains the property of the person(s) who uploaded it although obviously the uploader does give permission to Rootsy.com to publish the information for other family members to see. Full details may be found at http://blog.rootsy.com/privacy.

Rootsy.com is free for everyone. The site does plan to add advertising with commercial partners in the future but expects to always be free for users. The site's FAQ (frequently-asked-questions) simply says, "Coming soon!" Obviously, the site is in its infancy and is missing many of the things that we expect from mature web sites that have been in business for a while. Rootsy was developed by the QLabs tech incubator, backed by AOL, in Noho, New York.

Rootsy shows a lot of promise but it strikes me as not being ready for prime time just yet. The developers need to spend more time fleshing it out.

You can learn more about Rootsy.com at http://www.rootsy.com/.

Source: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2013/01/private-and-simple-family-sharing-on-rootsycom.html

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