WebBiographies

WebBiographies is a social network service with an emphasis on genealogy, biography and memoir writing, family trees, and online privacy. It was founded in late April, 2006 by Scott Purcell, 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.'" The family tree utility can...