A Family Social Network: MyHeritage
Even if Facebook gathers today more than 300 million users it might not be the favourite spot of everyone for family communication as you might want you relatives not to have access to some compromising documents. Moreover Facebook does not offer feature that really makes it family friendly. Some social networks have occupied this niche, among them MyHeritage. Mario Ruckh, Marketing Director of this company, gives us more insight on what you can do with MyHeritage.
Guillaume Foutry: Could you explain the concept of MyHeritage?
Mario Ruckh: MyHeritage is your private family social network that helps you stay in touch with your loved ones, share family photos, get birthday reminders and discover your family history. It’s super easy to use and all the basic features are free. Besides, there are strong genealogy features on the site, like a powerful genealogy search, and we also offer Family Tree Builder for download, the world’s most popular free genealogy software.
Earlier this year we released a new version of our photo service and you can now upload family photos via email or mobile devices, use our face recognition technology to find and tag the people in your photos and show a set of photos to relatives in impressive slideshows.
Our most recent innovation was a full integration of maps into our software, so you can chart location data of your ancestors, follow their migration paths or simply get an overview of where your relatives are currently living. It was launched together with our family toolbar that features the world’s first Family Chat, direct access to your family sites, immediate birthday reminders and an improved genealogy search.
G.F: How many people do you have on the website? What is the geographical reach of the platform? This question is to give people a view of your operations, so feel free to add any figures you deem relevant.
M.R: MyHeritage has more than 34 million users worldwide and is available in 34 languages, so families around the world are using it. We have a nice map, where you can see how many users there are from each country and also look at the profiles of the people who are currently registering (and if they agreed to appear in our community center). By the way, the company headquarters are in Bnei Atarot, a small village near Tel Aviv, Israel, but we also have an office in London and colleagues working from the U.S. and Australia.
G.F: Which directions are you going to take: staying a social network or going to the Find my Past directions (genealogy)? Could you imagine becoming a crowdsourcing genealogy engine (like people building a database of ancestors)?
M.R: Well, I guess we are a huge crowdsourcing genealogy engine already. The MyHeritage database consists of 370 million names, all uploaded by our users to help each other in their research. 370 million is about 7 times the number of people living in England at the moment, so it is massive. The names are from all around the world though and most of them are deceased people; names of living people in family trees are not public for privacy reasons.
We have developed a technology called Smart Matches that will tell you automatically, if some of your – maybe unknown – relatives also researched by someone else and on average there is a 20% chance that we’ll find a match for any one of the names you put in. You can read some of the very touching stories on our blog about users who have found some long lost relatives with the help of Smart Matches.
G.F: Facebook has been pushing recently for Groups for families as you can implement some restrictions on it and limit them to your inner circles. Do you consider this network as your most direct competitors?
M.R: Facebook is currently the most popular social network, is defining the category and constantly innovating its products. There are families, who are using it, but generally it is focussed on being a friends network, such as LinkedIn or XING is focussed on business contacts, and you don’t necessarily want to mix your family with any of those two groups.
The concept of having your own family site, collaboratively build your family tree and research your family history together are all areas where – for families – MyHeritage is superior to general social networks.
G.F: Where do you see the My Heritage going, what is the next step of your evolution?
M.R: Our support and product teams are constantly listening to what our users need and we will continue to build innovative technology that helps families to stay better connected, find out more about themselves and where they are coming from. Now and in the future we see ourselves as a provider of a lot of free tools for families and family historians, with some more sophisticated and professional ones available for small fees. Accessibility of data, while at the same time keeping highest standards for security and privacy of the users, continues to be our promise to remain a safe and reliable home for families online.
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