Respectance

So a few days ago I wrote about the website Respectance receiving funding and how it seemed like a preposterous concept. Well, I officially proved myself wrong and wanted to write about my recent experience with the site.

On Tuesday of last week I found out that my Grandpa who had been in poor health ever since he had a mild heart attack several months ago, was being moved to Hospice. My family, who keep in regular contact via email, started to collect photos of him in order to make a video for the impending service. Since our family keeps in such regular contact, I thought using a site like Respectance could be a really cool way to collect all of the photos in one place so that others who have been touched by my Grandfather (he delivered over ten thousand babies during his life) could view them and also add their own. In addition, the Respectance site lets users add videos, memories and create videos from the photos on the site.

In creating the site I was also able to add the text from his obituary to the front page, create a video with one of his favorite songs (Big Rock Candy Mountain) and help others in the family add photos. The site so far has been a bit hit with the family, partly because of its ease of use and also I think because it follows modern web standards as far as simplistic and clean design. I applaud the creators of the site for providing such a hassle free environment to honor the memory of my Grandfather and I really hope they are successful in the future.

Some of the things I'd like to see added to the site are the ability to upload audio without video (my grandfather did a radio interview that a couple of the grandkids set up which I would love to include on the site somehow) and also maybe some sort of forum for families to get together and chat.

We will see how the tribute to my Grandfather evolves over the next few months but so far I'd say Respectance is a hit and I am very happy with the level of innovation this new round of investment in social networks has fostered. So keep it up VC's; even if a lot of these sites flare up and disappear, the web and our social connections will be better for it in the end. I already feel closer to my relatives on that side of the family by involving them in this collaborative effort in honor of my Grandfather.

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).

Social Networking SSO?

So last night I had a thought that with the increasing number of social networking sites popping up, why isn't there something like a Single Sign On (SSO) for all of the sites. Additionally I was chatting with a friend a few months ago about why isn't there some sort of site that lets users aggregate their MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, etc, etc accounts on one page. Sort of like a feed reader for your profiles. Well, the guys at Mashable have a nice article today going over the different offerings in this arena.

It seems like there has got to be a bubble here; how many profiles on how many sites do you need before you are connected to Kevin Bacon?