Normally, social networking sites are designed to allow people to make connections that they previously would not have been able to make. This one is different. Instead of helping you find new social links, famiva.com simply brings out the ones that are already there. Not just any links, only the most important ones: Family.

The premise of this site is that one person starts a family site, which includes a family tree, family network, and profiles for each family member. This person then invites their family members to join. As each new person joins, they are added to the tree and family group, and are also allowed (and encouraged!) to add their other family members. One can only imagine how large this can grow, considering that you can end up with distant relatives of your distant relatives. I don’t know any of my second cousins, and I definitely don’t know any of their second cousins. While you watch your family grow before your eyes, you can also keep in touch with anyone on your family site, via a profile with vital information, photo sharing, a forum for sharing stories, and a world map. I would recommend this to anyone who is interested in genealogy or staying in touch with distant relatives.

In lecture we have been talking about the six degrees of separation, particularly in the context of Milgram’s experiment. When trying to get a letter to the stock broker in Boston, the participants had the disadvantage having to guess which path to start with. They had no way of seeing the entire social network. If they had this information available, the six degrees that we always hear about would be an overestimate. This site does not show your entire social network, but it does show your entire family, which brings will bring your degree of separation from distant relatives down significantly. If this had been around at the time of Milgram’s experiment, one of the random letter recipients in Nebraska may have discovered that his cousin Bob happened to have a cousin on the other side of his family who worked at the same company as the stock broker. I could see this being particularly useful in countries with very little immigration, such as Iceland (Iceland is famous for having a very homogeneous population, and many hereditary studies are done there). Since most people there are (distantly) related, one could easily create a family network that contains most of the country, which could possibly eliminate most of the country’s social distance. And this is just with familial links!