If you happened to be watching CNBC’s coverage of Wednesday’s Facebook F8 conference today you may have noticed that Familybuilder made a cameo!

Check us out at 1:23 into this clip.

Familybuilder celebrates its first anniversary today — with over 16 million family tree profiles!   And would you believe over 2 million profiles are being added every month?!  According to comScore, we’re the 4th largest genealogy service on the Internet (3/08).

Happy Birthday to us!

We’re growing much faster than the top genealogy sites like Geni.com and Ancestry.com because we’re the only one that’s tapping into social networks to empower people to build their family trees.  As you probably know, Familybuilder’s Family Tree application works with Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Hi5 and Orkut.

Here are some neat tidbits on our 1 year anniversary:

• The average family tree spreads across 6 generations.
• There are an average of 8 family members in each tree.
• Familybuilder users are spread throughout the globe with the USA (32%), Canada (19%) and UK (17%) comprising the majority.
• For 64% of users, Familybuilder represents their first online genealogy experience.

And check out some of these amazing stories from people who have been using the Family Tree application:

• I am used to mostly the African/ East Indian side of my family… but two of my closest cousins are half Finnish and it is totally amazing to see all of their Finnish and Swedish relatives on their family trees of which I am also a part of!
• I just found a cousin I haven’t heard from in 27 years!!
• Yes! I find it mind-boggling to be told my relationship to ancestors ten or more generations removed from me every time I access their data! Before using Family Tree, most of them were just names to me. Now, they truly have become family, even though they may be cousins several times removed, or a grandfather 12 generations back.
• The thing that has surprised me is that other family members I hadn’t heard from in years are connecting to it and so the family tree is always growing as new family members add themselves or connect with others.
• I have discovered many interesting things while building the family tree, in particular the fact that my paternal grandparents were cousins (apparently it was quite common in the last century for cousins to get married, a fact that I was not aware of).
• I found a few new cousins I didn’t even know they were part of my family!.. I mean they live in the same city, and we had never met!

As we enter our second year we’re excited to keep helping people connect with their relatives online.   We’ve got lots of surprises up our sleeves, too, so stay tuned.

In the early days of the Internet, everything was free. That is, all information posted online was available to everyone free of charge. Of course, in those days there wasn’t much information available that would have warranted a fee or a paid subscription. The brief information we found in those days was generally worth just about what we paid for it: nothing.

In the cross section of technology and genealogy, there remains a latent feeling that services to help build family trees and track family history should be free as well.

After the jump, I argue to the contrary.

(more…)

There are over 1.1 million living dads in the Familybuilder network!

Happy Father’s Day everyone!

On Facebook? Did you know you can send your dad a PDF of his family tree?

Just click on the link below and enter the email addresses of all the fathers that you have in your family tree and they will instantly receive a PDF of their family tree to print at home.

http://apps.facebook.com/familytree/FathersDay&link=1

Cheers!

We’d like to extend a big congratulations to our friends at Family
Tree Magazine on their one year “blogiversary”!

It’s been a whole year since Diane Haddad and team took to the
blogosphere to wax poetic about all-things-genealogy on their very
awesome blog, the Geneaolgy Insider. If you haven’t checked it out yet,
you really should!

Keep up the great work Diane!

Here’s to a great year number two!

We have some pretty exciting news this week!

For starters, we just launched Familybuilder’s Family Tree on both Hi5 and Orkut!    Now Family Tree is available on most all of the popular social networks!  Whether you’re on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo,  Orkut or Hi5, you can now easily build your Family Trees online and stay connected to your relatives like never before.

And that’s not it!

A little bird told us that Familybuilder is the #4 most trafficked genealogy destination on the Internet!   According to a report from comScore, a company that tracks traffic on the Internet, Familybuilder receives over 800,000 unique visitors per month.  (This data was from March … and now that we’re approaching June, we’re betting we’re now in the top 3!)

Also, we’re about to hit *15 million* family profiles across the network!   It’s quite exciting that our little company is out-doing a number of better-funded and more-established genealogy sites out there… and pretty significant given we haven’t even had our first birthday yet.

We want to thank everyone for their support!

Stay tuned for more exciting news coming down the pike.

Now — go tend to your Family Trees!

We launched the Family Tree application on Facebook in June of last year. It has been an exciting 11 months! Family Tree was the first genealogy app to be created within any social network. When we initially launched the app, we found ourselves with a very long “to-do” list of features – all of which are seemingly important. Thus far, I am proud to say, there are checkmarks next to many of the items on the list. But the list is also ever-growing. This is a good thing and speaks to the great potential of genealogy within social networks – something that is sure to provide even more benefit to our users in the future.

Having started off on Facebook, now, less than 11 months later, we are live on five social networks and more than 14 million relatives have been added to our apps. Facebook remains ahead of the pack in terms of its platform and we are always eager to participate in the continuous flow of new features that they are working on. But, at the same time, we believe that the bigger picture goes beyond Facebook (or any other single social network) and beyond Family Tree on Facebook. Our larger vision is to connect Family Tree on Facebook to Family Tree on Bebo to Family Tree on MySpace to…you get the point.

Instead of writing a long description of our plans, I invite you to keep an eye on this site over the weeks and months ahead as we move closer to creating a bridge between our different apps and providing you, the users, with an integrated solution. You can expect this blog to feature regular updates from our team as well as guest posts from experts in genealogy, social networking, and beyond.

We believe that Familybuilder is paving the way for a new approach in mapping ones family connections and collaborating with relatives in the process. Thank you for joining us on this exciting ride!

-Ilya