from Hacker News

1000Memories creates a Facebook time-machine for the past

by uripom on 9/27/11, 4:27 PM with 1 comments

  • by joelhaus on 9/27/11, 5:09 PM

    Data from Ancestry.com would also be a nice way to seed a social network... I'm actually surprised that it hasn't yet been an acquisition target for either Google+ or Facebook.

    As a pay service that is in dire need of an updated interface, there must be a ton of untapped value. From a technical perspective, I'm fairly certain that the data is exportable in GEDCOM format[1] (which, interestingly, was created by the Mormons), so mapping to a social network profile would be seamless. I know that older folk especially enjoy researching this kind of stuff, so you would also have a large built-in user base.

    With the advent of modern social networks and the availability of published first-hand accounts, services like 1000memories and Ancestry probably won't be multi-generational companies unless they find a unique angle to the social networking business and/or trap their users data.

    [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM