Tuesday, July 24, 2007

When is it all too much?

Okay, I'm all for this new Web 2.0 and social networking boom we have going on, and I love the fact that we're all so much more connected than we once were, but this site made me do a double take...

VentureBeat is reporting that Respecance a Social Network for sharing memories of people who have passed away just got 1.5 million in funding. I suppose it is just a natural extension of the stories that keep popping up when a kid dies who had a profile on MySpace and his profile is turned into a sort of shrine for his friends.

The more I think about it, it could work; my uncle recently passed away and my mom spent several days putting together a posterboard of his memories for the service. If this site would allow everyone to collaborate on that and come up with a video / photo album of memories from people you might not otherwise be able to contact or get media from, it could be pretty cool.

Okay, I started this post to vent on what the critical mass is for Web 2.0 social networking / collaboration sites and the funding they are getting but this one actually does seem like it might be worthwhile.

Another idea, and I'm sure its being done and has funding, is an online cookbook collaboration site where family members / friends can share recipes and then create a printable cookbook (nicely bound and such) for everyone to share. My Mom just did this with my relatives and produced a nice cookbook that I have in my kitchen right now. The problem was she had to get all the recipes from the family, compile them with some archaic software program and then bring it to Kinkos to bind it. A service for that would have been very handy I think (I'll have to poke around the web and find who is doing this sort of thing right now).

1 comment:

Brian Erickson said...

Well, I apparently don't give my mom enough credit. She used a site called familycookbookproject.com which allows you to sign in, create a cookbook project and then invite others to add recipes and eventually you can print the cookbook through the site. Very cool, although a few things that I don't like:
1. They have an annual fee of $30
2. Recipes are 'owned' by the site and if you stop subscribing they take all your recipes.
3. There is no export feature besides downloading a PDF of the cookbook.

Seems like there might still be room for a site to make this thing a bit more social and open it up (I could see a lot of product placement and target advertising replacing the subscription format). Also, why not just farm the printing out to Kinkos or something instead of dealing with that side. Partner with Kinkos to get the format down and use the services that allow you to send the document to Kinkos electronically.