| Type of site | Social network service with a focus on Genealogy and Biography |
|---|---|
| Registration | Open |
| Owner | Private |
| Created by | Web Biographies, LLC |
| Type | Private start-up |
|---|---|
| Industry | Genealogy, Biography, Social networking services |
| Founded | April 2006 |
| Headquarters | Denver, Colorado, USA |
| Key people | Scott Purcell, founder and President |
WebBiographies was a website founded by Scott Purcell with an emphasis on genealogy, family trees, biography and memoir writing.
Background
WebBiographies was founded in April, 2006 by Scott Purcell,[1] founder of Epoch Networks and a former Board member of the Commercial Internet eXchange.
In an interview for MIT Technology Review, Scott stated that WebBiographies was founded with a "grown-up" audience in mind:
"Like a lot of people, growing up I sat around the kitchen table hearing stories about great aunts and great-great-grandfathers, and very little of it is written down... A couple of years ago I thought, let's write it down on the Internet. But all the tools out there were genealogy stuff, for making family trees.
My partner and I were playing around on MySpace and were very impressed by what they were doing. But MySpace is used mainly by young people and to be honest, it's a bit of a chaotic mess. We said, "There should be a MySpace for grownups. Let's do it.'"[2]
Genealogy features
The family tree utility continued ad infinitum. For instance, if you'd traced your family lineage to the Fifteenth century, WebBiographies' family tree utility would have accommodated it. Each family member or ancestor added to the family tree was instantly assigned a free account, so that users could upload pictures and stories about him or her without sacrificing the user's own storage space.
WebBiographies was also working on GEDCOM compliance for their online family tree, and users who had resources using this file standard would have been able to upload that information to their family tree.
They also had links to other genealogical resources available elsewhere on the internet.
Social networking features
WebBiographies' genealogy and biography/memoir utilities were combined with Web 2.0 features such as the ability to connect one's web biography with friends and family and "comment" on journal entries.
Online privacy protection features were also offered to users of the service. Users may have chosen to have their blogs, scrapbooks, biographies, or family histories displayed publicly or password-protected and locked from view by all except those whom the user chose. There were three levels of password protection options.
There were also weblogging features and one's site was organized like a book, with customizable "Chapters". In addition, every biography page was assigned a unique URL.
Digital photos, digital video, and .mp3s were shared and/or stored along with users' biography pages. Users were "connected" to one another's biographies, to stay abreast of new journals and photos as they were posted.
WebBiographies also supported foreign language formats and had many members from Eastern Europe and Asia.
Notes
- ^ Kharif, Olga (September 24, 2006). "Boomers: A Web-Marketing Bonanza". Bloomberg Businessweek. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-09-24/boomers-a-web-marketing-bonanza. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
- ^ Roush, Wade (May 09, 2006). "Website Helps Armchair Biographers". Technology Review. Archived from the original on March 12, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070312060004/http://www.techreview.com/blog/editors/16818/. Retrieved April 10, 2012.
References
- Byte-sized biographies, Rocky Mountain News
- Web Biographies: Leaving a Legacy, About.com
- spot on Roots Television
External links
| This page uses content from the English language Wikipedia. The original content was at WebBiographies. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with this Familypedia wiki, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons License. |