What's a good web site for dispersed relatives to gather?

May 24, 2006 6:51 PM

I am looking for a free, easy to use, web site where people with my last name can have a discussion board, post photos to a gallery, as well as create some wiki-type pages...

...for documents of interest to the group. We are currently using a microsoft group site, which I really don't like. It's slow, the discussions and photo gallery are outdated, and it requires registering for their passport service. I saw the earlier posting about an online, collaborative genealogy tool. We're looking more for a place to gather and share information.

posted by pantufla to human relations (7 comments total)

Are you looking to join a site, or create one?
posted by danb at 8:11 PM on May 24, 2006

join one. Use someone's template like blogger.
posted by pantufla at 9:49 PM on May 24, 2006

There's Schtuff which is free "wiki-style" hosting that includes image galleries. It does not have a discussion board, but theoretically, you could use wiki pages for that. I think that in order to get everything you need for free, you would probably have to install wiki software of your own.

I'm currently using tikiwiki which has discussion boards, file and image galleries, blogs, wiki pages, live chat rooms, and an articles feature. The problem with that is that you have to have your own domain, you need to install it, and you need to set up some features. On the plus side, if you have a domain hosted, you might already have tikiwiki with an autoinstaller as part of the ubiquitous Fantastico package.
posted by Kimberly at 11:42 PM on May 24, 2006

I've had a family group on Yahoo Groups since before its predecessor was acquired by Yahoo. Yahoo Groups is more feature-filled than MSN Groups, although the requirement to have a Yahoo account to access some of the features is daunting to technophobes. The senior citizens on my list never access any of the Yahoo Groups features that require a login. I keep the email list active and on everyone's mind by having Yahoo Calendar send out reminders of birthdays and anniversaries.

Yahoo has also eliminated the online file storage for groups, because the storage became a popular feature for groups that swapped illegal files. That cultural phenomenon may make it hard to find one-stop shopping for everything you want in a family site.

I bought my own web hosting account and I use Gallery in it as the tool for a family web photo gallery. I tried a family message board, but found that it went mostly unused. I suspect a wiki would, too.

If I was starting from scratch today, I might use Flickr as the centerpiece of the family photo Gallery.
posted by excoriator at 6:59 AM on May 25, 2006

Jot.com

My family seems to be early beta testers, and the site still has a few bugs, but they respond to troubleshooting emails promptly and personally, plus it's FREE BEER and offers plenty of perks, including everything you request, plus the possibility to creat polls, collect recipes, make a family tree (sort of), share photos and addresses, and it hosts a collective family blog. It's a wiki. Once they fix all the bugs, it will be dependable, but in the meantime it's just really useful.
posted by billtron at 7:36 AM on May 25, 2006

You can try myfamily.com
posted by Julnyes at 11:50 AM on May 25, 2006

thanks for all your suggestions.
posted by pantufla at 5:18 PM on May 25, 2006