Amiglia the Blog

ChameleonIntegration review of Amiglia

Thanks to Somu of ChameleonIntegration for posting this Amiglia review:

Amiglia - Social Networking + Photo Sharing + Family Tree

Amiglia is a popular social networking site with 2 twists. It has photo sharing facility and allows you to build a family tree. Founded by Paul and Milena Berry (Husband and Wife), Amiglia creates a mashup of Friendster and Flickr. It lets you to build a family tree and also associate a cool picture along with it.

My first impressions are its ease of navigation. Since the site is targeted on people of all age groups (family tree), not-so-internet-savvy people also need to be taken into account. The features are easily identifiable and the theme is more of an informal look.

The site is loaded with tons of features:

• You can email to the people in your group
• Send an instant message to chat
• Engage the toddlers in your home with the interactive games offered
• Make a free call using Skype
• Share your photos
• Add your digital audios and videos.
• The image recognition program allows you to recognize the faces, and I have to say that its still not full fledged like other image search programs.

If you would like to get a detailed look, try this Amiglia Demo. For a cost of $49.95, I think they are expensive. But if you are curious to get to know the product, there’s a tryout period of 1 month which should give you enough time to test them.

      

Amiglia is Techdigest Social Networking Site of the Day

Thanks Stuart Dredge from Techdigest for the awesome review:

If you're not already a member of at least 13 social networking websites, you're a digital nobody. And more are springing up every day, flush with venture-capital and bright ideas on how to bring people together. Which is why Tech Digest is going to sniff out the latest, the greatest, and most crucially the ones that AREN'T just a pale YouTube / Flickr / MySpace rip-off.

First up is Amiglia, which really is one of those 'why didn't anyone think of it before?' ideas. It bills itself as 'Family 2.0', which means it's a photo-sharing site, but with a focus on family trees. As we genealogists like to say, it's the illegitimate child of a one-night stand between Flickr and Ancestry.com. Or something.

Anyway, you can get a sense of how Amiglia works by looking at its demo site. Each person's profile is a mixture of photos, videos, music and information. You can even enter your ancient family recipes, although in my case that would be 'swearing, chucking the wok across the kitchen, ordering takeaway Chinese'.

The profile is one way to navigate, as everyone is linked to their husband/wife, parents, siblings and children, allowing you to click through to browse their profiles and latest stuff. There's a separate 'facebook' of your family, friends and, er, pets – complete with built-in links to start Skype chats or conference calls. If Grandma hasn't quite got the hang of this Voice-over-IP or Web 2.0 lark yet, Amiglia might be a good homepage to set her up with, bringing all these features together.

There's also a powerful-looking Family Calendar feature, where you can schedule events, and set up birthday alerts so you don't forget Aunt Edna's 50th. But niftily, you can then use this calendar to navigate through photos taken at these occasions. Meanwhile, when you upload a photo, it's automatically updated in all the family trees that you belong to.

I think the big appeal about Amiglia is that it really is designed around what interactions you'd want with your family, rather than being just another Flickr knock-off with a mild genealogy theme. It's also got good connectivity, being able to import your existing photos from Flickr, and your GEDCOM genealogy data if you've already been using a family history website or application.

And there's some cool geotagging features too, to link your photos to the place they were taken – although I think this might be a step too far for some of the less web-savvy users that Amiglia is clearly targeting. Having used some of the fairly complex family history communities online, I can say that Amiglia succeeds mightily in bringing some Web 2.0 accessibility to the party.

Postbubble: Amiglia is trying to get your whole family online

Thanks Aneil Weber from Postbubble:  What will float and what will sink in the Web 2.0 space about the excellent review:

We talked about MADE Planet hitting a social networking niche properly. Another site that really did well with this is Amiglia.

Amiglia is a social network that really targets families as a place where each of them can login and see what’s going on with Aunt, Uncle, Cousin, Grandma, Grandpa, and any other person in the family tree. It’s easy to use and by clicking on somebody in the family tree it goes immediately to that person’s profile. Getting started is pretty fast (but could be faster) however once you set the basics up they make it easy to contact the whole family and let them know what’s going on and get them involved. They have things like recipes, calendar, videos, albums, and maps.

Of all the family 2.0 sites I’ve seen, this one takes the cake. It does give a few of the latest goodies like links to flickr and a tag feature however for the most part they keep it simple and will most likely not scare mom and dad away. Probably the most important thing about this site is that they picked their features extremely well by offering only the things that most families will want.

All I can say is that if this site stays true to what it started with, it will blow up. The key is to get all of the youngsters to initiate the service and send those email invites to the family. This process should actually be faster and not one of the last things you do when setting up an account. This is one of the most important things to do these days in order to ensure that your visitors turn into users. Active or not, at least you got them to sign up and if Mom sees what this site can do then she might just take it from there. I am floating Amiglia for being the second social network on Postbubble to hit a niche properly. They give their users what they want and only what they need.

Read an interview with the founders at Emily Chang’s eHub.

Social Networking - Here to Stay?

We just read a very interesting review including Amiglia today:

Social networks -- future portal or fad?

Here's what I think:

The MySpaces and Facebooks of the Internet have their market - teens and college students. While this is a great market to have, it also poses some problems as the market grows up. As the youngsters get into college, then careers, they have less and less time to spend on the Internet attracting new Internet friends. They move on – into real life with real relationships.

New sites, recently branded as Family 2.0 (http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6079271.html) go beyond the trendy friendship sites by building networks around what the adult population cares about. As we get older we long for connections with family members and long time friends. The Internet, and Web 2.0 most recently, is great at enabling the sharing of stories, thoughts, interests, photos, movies, baby advice, etc. Sites like Amiglia.com, Minti.com, Cingo.com, Roundbook.com, OurStory.com, etc are heading in this direction... all of these sites have what fad networking sites will not be able to maintain - sharing based on real relationships.

Profitability comes into play here too. Relying on ad dollars may work if the site has a large enough user base, but families are willing to pay for premium content that allows the sharing of large movie files, storage of photos that grandma can download and print at full quality, family history archiving, etc.

Amiglia on Diva Marketing Blog

Toby Bloomberg posted a short online interview with Milena on her Diva Marketing Blog:

Capturing memories at special times is a must. Sharing your memories is a must as well. Have you seen the cool new mash-up (my new fav word) Amiglia? It combines photos, blogs, videos, music, calendars, tags, chat, Google maps all in the format of an interactive family album.

Amiglia is a family owned small business. Milena Berry, one of the founders, and I exchanged a few emails. I was intrigued with the name of the company - Amiglia. Milena told me it's a  wordplay of the Italian word for family "famiglia." Here's a peek inside this famiglia start-up business..from the perspective of Diva Milena.

Amiglia for your Famiglia

The Under the Radar Blog wrote about Amiglia's secret sauce today:
Sector: online photo management and social network for families
Funding: Private funding with a business model of sales. Amiglia Basic membership is free giving 1GB of photos and videos per year and Amiglia Standard membership is $49.95/year giving 100 GBs of photo space per year (approximately 20,000 high resolution photos!). More pricing options here.
Secret Sauce:A photographic family tree with music and video! This site has really grabbed on to the idea of how much families love pictures of each other and how they love to make connections between all the family members. The site has easy mass uploading, upload by email or from your camera phone. Video clip support, no ads, backup DVDs and storage of the original high resolution photos. Parents and relatives can record sound bites to go with their pictures. This site is heavily database driven application, built primarily in Cold Fusion with a SQL server back-end. Albums can be connected to each other, making it a great way to connect photos and profiles from living relatives for a family history book or upcoming reunion. When you upload new photos to your own album, they also get automatically uploaded to any related families’ albums. You can also create a single family site, and provide your relatives with separate family passwords for upload rights, edit rights, etc. Rafe Needleman wrote, “Amiglia’s add-ons to this structure are well targeted to navigating this network: there’s a Java-based game for children, where they get to identify family members; and there are mapping tools to show destinations on a family vacation.”

Talking tech on Family 2.0 posts an update on Amiglia

Rachel Cook from Talking Tech on Family 2.0 posted a nice update on Amiglia:

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.

Lynne D. Johnson writes about living in a new new media world

lynne d johnson mentioned Amiglia on her post on "new new media world" in Diary today:

Likewise Paul and Milena Berry's Amiglia, a site focused on building family networks through the sharing of photo albums and enabling of the creation of a virtual family tree by attaching photos to people in the tree, also has a place in this new economy. You can even import photos from flickr. The site includes a family calendar, birthday reminders, mp3 uploads for slideshows, Skype intergation, favorite recipes, stories, toddler games, family and trip/vacation maps and photo tagging --- all for the means of creating social media for families.

Corante reviews Amiglia

Dave Evans from Corante wrote an extensive review about Amiglia. Thanks Dave, and for the great idea on Skype calling and chats integration in Amiglia:

Amiglia, Social Software for Parents and Family

Posted by Dave Evans

They say necessity is the mother of invention. Amiglia evolved out of a family photo site which became a focal point for all the Berrys' family pictures and memories. The large family realized they needed a better way to share the newest photos, as well as to unravel the old photos of common ancestors. Amiglia is social networking at the family level.

I spoke with Paul Berry, who started the site with his father Tim. Tim is President of Palo Alto Software, if you have ever written a business plan you probably have used his products.

Amiglia is focused on family networks, tying the visual family tree with an online photo album. Spread the site to your nuclear and distant family, discover and archive old photos of common relatives and keep up to date with each other. The site includes a family calendar, birthday reminders, mp3 uploads for slideshows, favorite recipes, stories, family and trip/vacation maps and powerful photo tagging.

We just launched the first version of a kids game - currently for toddlers. Parents and relatives can record their voices and match them to photos of that person. Particularly good for keeping babies familiar with relatives they don't see on a daily basis, it also has a mesmerizing effect on the little ones. We've taken the basics of computer gaming for children, for example they can hammer away at the keyboard for extra effects but without navigating away or causing problems. As the toddlers get older the game will evolve to teach them to read, match places they've been to to points on the map, etc. You can see more about the game here.

Amiglia is currently in beta. Pricing is currently $49.95 per year, with premium and Pro versions at $100 and $150. Competitors include MyFamily.

They were smart to pull content from other sites like Flickr into Amiglia, no need to replicate the photos all over the interweb. The site is a bit rough around the edges and you can tell this was hatched in Silicon Valley- CNET mention of their data management solutions on home page, geeks! Initial feedback has been positive. Expect new features and partnerships soon.

Update: Skype integration is in alpha. I recently worked with someone on a similar family-oriented site concept with embedded Skype functionality. Once it's set up it makes it easy for grandma to read junior a bed time story.

Amiglia is a Favorite in Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics newsletter

Brandon Watts of the Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics newsletter posted a really nice write-up about Amiglia's family software today:

Although it can be very tough sometimes, it’s vital to help keep families together. It’s truly a shame if you can’t look to your family for support. One of the main reasons why the family structure disintegrates over time for some people is because of a lack of communication. If the various members aren’t making an effort to stay in touch and keep each other updated as to what’s going on, then erosion and collapse is inevitable over time. It may be hard to imagine the fact that a Web site can help to unify your family, but with Amiglia, that just might be the case.

The site is unique in its creation because it was originally created by a family for their family. When they realized that they had a good thing going, they then developed it further and opened it up to you and I. You'll be able to share photos, create slideshows, and document the memories that were made on various family trips. Along with this, you're also given the ability to create a family calendar and an interactive family tree, which links you to the profiles for the people within your family. One of the most interesting concepts is the game that they have built for toddlers. By using pictures and sound recordings, you can help your little ones to get to know their relatives in a simple, fun, and safe way.