MyHeritage is a social network and software for genealogists. Launched in 2005, MyHeritage has since accumulated 33 million users worldwide. The company helps people build family trees, share them with their relatives and stay in touch with their loved ones. They are the most popular free family tree website according to ProGeneologists.com. Family Tree Builder, their geneology software program, is the most popular free geneology application.

MyHeritage started only as a free software program. With Web 2.0 taking a more dominant role, the company understood that people wanted to share their family tree and therefore it evolved into more of a network where people could collaboratively build and share their family trees, photos, receive birthday notifications, plan family events, or even send gifts to their loved ones.

The site has unique free genealogy tools such as Smart Matches which compare any person in your tree with the whole database and show the user other people researching the same ancestors. This can help researchers discover long-lost branches of their family, many generations apart. Some of those stories can be found on their blog. Generations of families have reunited across continents, languages, and cultures.

The most important genealogy product on MyHeritage is a simple piece of software called Family Tree Builder, which is really easy to use even for those not very experienced in the genealogy world. They also offer a more advanced Premium version for those who are really into genealogy. This week, they have just launched the latest version of Family Tree Builder (currently available for Windows-only).

Family Tree Builder is the most popular free geneology software. With more than 5 million downloads so far, Family Tree Builder is the world’s most popular free genealogy software, allowing seasoned pros and beginners alike to build family trees, research their family history, add photos and videos, and obtain unique Smart Matches™ with other family trees worldwide.

With today’s release, their software just got even more user-friendly. Some of the new features of Family Tree Builder include:

• Maps - Family Tree Builder 4.0 features a new module that shows you all of the places mentioned on your tree. Even more important, perhaps, given changing geographical borders and political boundaries, is a feature that suggests how to improve your data and fix spelling and consistency mistakes in place names. For example, a family tree contributed by many members of an extended family might refer to Dumbrowa, Dabrowa,  and Dabrowa Bialystocka, and someone might think that these are all different locations when they refer to the same Polish town, but not the similiar-sounding Dabrowa Gornicka. The maps module is free for all users, with size limitations lifted for Premium and Premium Plus members.
• Photo Albums – Photos and photo sharing are an integral part of MyHeritage. Family Tree Builder lets geneologists organize their photos into albums with simple drag and drop. When you publish your tree to MyHeritage’s website, your photo albums remain intact.
• Slideshow & Screen Saver – Family Tree Builder can display your pictures as a slideshow or screen saver that displays your family photos when your computer is idle. It also integrates with MyHeritage’s tagging and facial recognition features.
• Family Toolbar – An integrated toolbar integrated with MyHeritage.com, the toolbar provides the world’s first Family Chat that lets you chat with family members whenever they are online. It also lets you visit your family site in a single click, get birthday reminders and perform powerful genealogy searches.
• Recovery – When you restore a family tree that was published online, your photos will be recovered.
• Family Tree Builder also includes a new tool that finds family members that are probably deceased but not mentioned as such in your tree.
• Multilanguage support – Family Tree Builder supports over 34 languages, both making it useful for a worldwide audience and also more useful than competing programs as many people’s families span multiple continents and languages over the generations.

“In recent years we’ve seen a growing number of people who want to learn more about their ancestors and where they came from,” said Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage.com. “With the new map module, people can get an appealing visual representation of their family’s life journeys. They can also map the addresses of family members, quickly find all events and photos associated with a particular place and even standardize place names using smart suggestions. This provides a fascinating new perspective for millions of people interested in their family history.”

The new family toolbar provides direct access to family sites on MyHeritage.com, adds powerful genealogy search and features Family Chat – a text, audio and video chat system built specifically for family use. Members also receive useful birthday reminders on the family toolbar without leaving the Web page they are on.

Family Tree Builder’s family tree display is much easier to use than some of the competing commercial software. For example, you can display at least seven generations on a single screen, as well as marital status and other personal information, without the page feeling cramped. In addition, it’s far less resource hogging than the competing Family Tree Maker.

It’s impossible to find free family tree builder software as powerful and user-friendly as Family Tree Builder. In fact, the paid version has more interesting features and a nice simple UI, without the memory hog, of its leading competitors. Family Tree Builder is definately an incredibly useful tool to have in the amateur or professional geneologist’s toolbox.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Mario F. Ruckh, Director of Marketing at MyHeritage, when I was in London last month. Here is MyHeritage in his own words:

The Facebook photos application has been by far Facebook’s biggest success, the easy to use interface for uploading pics from your computer and then brilliant point-and-click tagging of friends has proved intensely viral; there are now more than fifteen billion photos on Facebook, making it the largest collection of pictures in human history. More than 850 million new photos are uploaded a month with no signs of slowing down, and Facebook’s servers display twenty billion photos every month.

The question is; how many of those pictures are of you? Well you know how many of them you’ve been tagged in but how many photos are out there that you have no idea about? A new application launched today aims to answer that question.

Photo-Finder will go through all the albums in Facebook that your account has access to, and using their fast, powerful and accurate facial recognition technology, scan Facebook to find untagged photos and let you browse through the results. There’s no need to train Photo Finder, it does that for you. Photo Finder shows you all of the results sorted by accuracy or date, letting you review its findings so that future searches become more accurate. With Photo Finder you also get notified whenever a photo of you gets posted, even if no one tagged it. Photo-finder lets you know first and gives you the chance to hide potentially embarrassing photos from other Photo Finder users.

Photo-Finder also has the ability to push information on newly discovered photos to your FB news feed, giving this app a real chance to go viral as more and more people discover pics they never knew about.

 The Technology behind this app was developed by the app’s creators Face.com. This patent-pending technology is based on Face.com ’s own proprietary algorithms that allow them to achieve high accuracy for recognizing faces in the real-life photos of the web on a massive scale. In an experimental real-life faces dataset (“Labeled Faces in the Wild”) organized by the University of Massachusetts, an Hybrid descriptor-based algorithm published together with the face.com team outperformed significantly best-known algorithms to date; comparison at http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html .

It seems that Photo-Finder has a very real chance of changing the way we interact with the Facebook photos platform and perhaps give us a real taste of a future where computers can actually recognize very complex visual data like faces and correctly tag them. The founders behind Face are close friends of mine and knowing their combined set of skills and technological abilities, I am certain that this application will be more technologically advanced than any other we’ve seen so far.

Conference speakers include Anthony Lukom, Managing Director at Myspace UK; Kate Burns, Managing Director and VP at Europe for Bebo & People Networks; Gerrit Mueller, Senior Director of Mobile Products at Connected Life Yahoo! Europe; Mark Watts-Jones, Head of Development and Innovation at Orange UK; Sean Kane, Head of Mobile at Bebo; Henry Clifford-Jones, Director of Media Sales Europe at LinkedIn; and Natalie Johnson, Manager of Social Media Communications at General Motors.

In addition to speakers there will also be an exhibition hall at the conference where different social networks and social networking applications booths will be set up.  Exhibitors include BT Tradespace, Lithium, PlayJam, KickApps, Elemental, Ecademy, Reality Digital, FourRoads and Webjam, amongst others.

The Social Networking World Forum is shaping up to be the perfect event for professionals looking to learn more about social networking and the future of social media.  The conference aims to address core issues such as monetization, future technologies/services, engaging social groups with brands and how businesses can get the most out of social and business networks.

If you’d like to attend the Social Networking World Forum the organizers are offering a 20% discount to all Blonde 2.0 readers.  Call the booking hotline +(44) 0117 321 8303, email Mark@sixdegs.com or fill out the PDF booking form here and quote ‘blonde20′ to claim the 20% discount.  If you are attending the event I’ll see you there and for those who can’t make it I will be covering the conference on my blog, so stay tuned.

Barack Obama used social media to get himself into the White House and thousands of companies are using social media to create brand awareness and an online buzz.  However, social media can also be used for many other purposes as well. If you work in Human Resources, you may be thinking, “I dont want to get to the White House — I just want to recruit some employees”.  Social networks are an amazing channel for finding potential employees and increasingly becoming an even expected way of finding them.

Social networking is a great recruitment tool for several reasons:

1. Social networks make it easy to build relationships with potential candidates and to create an open channel for discussion through which candidates can feel comfortable enough to approach you and ask you questions. It’s often the case also that people are dissatisfied with their current place of employment but are too afraid to actively look for a job online. By becoming their friend, you build a trusting relationship with them where they feel comfortable to let you know about their desire to find new employment. If you create real close relationships with people, they will feel comfortable enough to forward you their friends’ resumes as well.

2. Through social networks you can easily find relevant candidates for any position by searching for candidates with the skills your company is looking for.

3. When you recruit in social networks your company will reap the added benefit of spreading brand awareness and increasing the desire of others to work at your company.

4. One of the most popular ways to find a potential candidate is through connections.  When you begin recruiting in social networks you expand your personal network so that you can reach a much larger number of potential candidates.

5. Job boards are on the way out and more and more employers are turning to social networks for recruitment.  In fact, according to a recent survey done in the US, 78% of HR executives said that they use social media to recruit employees (see video). If your company doesn’t want to be left behind in the dust, it’s important to start acting today. Especially since there are many unemployed people right now just waiting to find the right job for them.

888 which stands for innovation is one of the first companies in Israel to recruit employees through social networks. I recently gave a lecture at the largest HR conference in the Middle East about how I help them recruit employees through Web 2.0 tools and the benefits of HR 2.0.  Watch the below video to see my lecture:

Technorati tags: social media, brand awareness, online buzz, HR, recruitment, social networking, social networks, potential candidates, employment, Human Resources, job boards, recruit employees, HR conference, 888, HR 2.0, innovation, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 tools

Post written by guest author Megan O’Neill

As sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg continue to grow, it is becoming increasingly apparent to everyone that investing in your social networks can be one of the best ways to promote yourself or your brand.

However, when you are new to the world of social media you may not have the slightest idea about how to get started. If you are still just testing the waters, these top ten tips can help you take the plunge into using social networks to successfully promote yourself or your brand. By the way, I’ll be referring to the term “Social Networks” here in the broader sense, including Social Bookmarking and video sites.

1. Choose Your Networks Wisely

If you spend any amount of time on the Internet then you are aware of the vast number of social networks there are to choose from. There’s Facebook, Bebo, hi5, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and YouTube, just to name “a few.”

When you are beginning your social networking campaign you should decide which of these networks are the most relevant for your purposes. For instance, if you want to join a network for professional business contacts then you should join LinkedIn and Facebook rather than Bebo or MySpace (unless you’re a musician). On the other hand, if you want to promote a hip new clothing line to teens, then LinkedIn is the last place you’ll want to be.

In order to make an informed decision about which networks to join you will have to do a little research. Figure out what your goals are, who your target audience is and then read some articles and look around in different networks to see where you could best achieve those goals. Don’t sell yourself short on research time—choosing the right networks is one of the most important keys to social networking success.

2. Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

Once you have come up with your list of relevant social networks you need to decide which ones you are going to join. Be content with the knowledge that you cannot join ALL of the networks on the Web or you won’t have the time to use any of them to their full potential.

Choose a few social networks that fit your needs and that you feel comfortable with and focus your attention on them—build a profile, join groups, add and communicate with friends. Putting all of you effort into a few social networks is much more effective than wearing yourself out trying to achieve the bare minimum in a ton of social networks.

It is also important not to spread yourself too thin when you are joining groups in social networks. It is better to be an active and integral part of a few large groups than to be a member of 100 groups that you never even look at.

3. Give Character to your Profiles

Before you start adding friends it is important to fill out your profiles as fully as possible. Include your name, age and location. Write about your interests, your education, your job, why you are here, what kind of hobbies you have… the more information you can give the better.

It is also important to upload a nice picture of yourself. Your picture should be eye catching and professional, showing your face with a smile. Yes, in theory you could upload a picture of Heath Ledger as The Joker to your profile (I’ve seen a lot of this on Digg lately) but this isn’t very personal. Your online friends want to see what you look like and get to know your real details and interests.

4. Be Consistent

If you have profiles on several networks it is important to be consistent. Use the same photo and the same screen name on all of your profiles. If you are consistent between your profiles then friends will begin to recognize you immediately and add you to all of their networks, meaning that they will be exposed to your content through a variety of different channels. This is a good thing.

5. Birds of a Feather Flock Together

When you are adding friends to your social networks it is important to add friends that have the same interests as you or an interest in what you are trying to promote. If you add friends that share your interests then they will not only be more likely to accept your request and add you as a friend in return, they will also take an interest in the stories you share and what you have to say and will help you spread the word.

6. Put Your Heart in It

When you are building up your social networks, even if it is just for business or promotional purposes, it is important to be personable. Put a genuine effort into getting to know your contacts through messaging, sharing links, commenting on posts and pictures, and providing feedback. The more you talk with people the more familiar they will become with you. They will be more likely to check out your content and share it with their own friends.

When someone adds you as a friend, send them a welcome message thanking them for adding you and telling them a little bit about yourself; send birthday greetings when you see that it’s their birthday; leave comments about your friends’ statuses and posts.

It is also extremely important to follow through with your friends. If you say you’ll get back to someone then you should get back to them. You should be just as considerate of your online friends as you are of your real life friends.

7. Be Active Regularly

It is important to be active regularly on all of your accounts. Comment in groups and forums, update your profile and status and add new applications regularly. This will keep you on the radar in your friends’ feeds.

Each day, sign in to each of your accounts and respond to any messages or comments your friends have left you. It is important to respond to messages in a reasonable amount of time to let people know that you care. It is also important to keep in mind that social networks never sleep. There are no “Sundays” on social networks, so make sure to check your profiles regularly.

8. Submit Quality Content

When you bookmark stories and websites and post links to your social networks it is important to make sure that you are submitting quality content. Read through an entire story before you post it to make sure that it is something you really want to post under your name and that it’s worth the time of the friends you are sharing it with. The better the material that you submit, the more people will follow you and be interested in seeing what you will submit next.

9. Nobody Likes a Spammer

Don’t overload your friends with links, messages, comments and content. If you overload people they will either flag you as a spammer or remove you from their friends. Stick to sending relevant, quality content that your friends will get something out of.

10. Don’t Stress Yourself Out!

Social networking should be a positive experience.  After all, you are making new friends and socializing with people who share your interests.  Interacting with and getting to know these people should be fun experience, so don’t stress yourself out.

With these ten tips you have the guidelines for building strong and valuable social networking skills.  When you choose the right networks and start having fun with them while achieving your goals, the possibilities are endless.

Thanks to StefanKeijzer for the pic.

Megan O’Neill has worked with a number of Internet and media related companies both in the United States and in Israel in design, content and marketing positions. She currently works at Blonde 2.0 as a Social Media Marketing Assistant.

The Pew Research Center has recently come out with its “Internet’s Broader Role in Campaign 2008” report. This report’s findings are based on the results of a survey the Center conducted in December 2007 amongst 1430 American adults. The data is fascinating and I wanted to share of its most intriguing findings with you.

Summary of Findings:

1) The internet is becoming one of the leading sources for news about the presidential campaign for all Americans. 24% of Americans say they regularly learn something about the campaign from the internet, almost double the percentage from respondents in the 2004 campaign (13%) and almost triple the percentage found in the 2000 campaign (9%).

2) The internet has become a leading source of campaign news for young Americans. 42% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly learn about the campaign from the internet. In 2004, only 20% of this demographic group said that they got such news from the internet. 

An interesting side note, since young Americans find their campaign news online as opposed to older Americans who are more likely to receive their news from traditional sources, it’s definitely worth examining how these trends may affect the different age groups’ voting decisions and opinions.

3) Amongst those Americans who rely on the internet for their news, MSNBC, CNN, and Yahoo News are the most popular sites. However, it’s interesting to note that 3% turn to MySpace and 2% turn to YouTube. Roughly four-in-ten people under age 30 (41%) have watched at least one campaign video online, compared with 20% of those ages 30 and older.

4) 27% of Americans younger than age 30 – including 37% of those ages 18-24 – have said that they received campaign news from social networking sites. This fact is true only when we look at the young demographic; 4% of Americans in their 30s, and 1% of those ages 40 and older, have received information about the campaign in this manner.

I know I have received quite a good deal of news regarding the different candidates on Twitter and Facebook. Barack Obama’s people have done an amazing branding job online.

TV Still #1 Information Source But Slipping

26% of Americans mention the internet either first or second as their main source of election news. Among young Americans, the internet is gaining popularity as a main source for election news while television is losing its popularity. In 2004, 75% of those ages 18 to 29 cited television and only 21% cited the internet as their main source for campaign news. Today those numbers have changed. 60% of this age group cite Television and 46% cite the internet as their primary source for election news.

Top Three Election News Sites and the Long Tail

While 54% of American users get their campaign news from MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo, there is also a very long tail of other such online sources. While only 13 individual websites were named by 1% or more of the people who get campaign news online, hundreds of individual websites were named by fewer than 1%.

29% of those Americans who get news online cite one of these smaller websites as a source of campaign information. This means that for every person getting campaign news from a site like MSNBC, there is a person getting campaign news from one of these long tail websites. Such websites may represent local newspapers, TV stations and radio stations sites. However, according to the findings, a large percentage of these sites are internet news sites – politically oriented or otherwise.

Perhaps many of these sites are political blogs written by citizens. It would be interesting to examine how the emergence of such blogs has changed the way we view politics and what kind of effect this has had on our political opinions and voting decisions.

Younger Americans cite more election information sources than older Americans. MySpace is cited by 8% of the 18-29 age group, less than 1% of those ages 30 and over, and the pattern for YouTube is almost identical.

Online Campaign Activities

As we have seen, all the candidates used the Web in order to communicate their political messages to the public.

About one-in-six Americans (16%) have sent or received emails with friends and family regarding candidates and the campaign, and 14% have received email messages from political groups or organizations about the campaign.

Most candidates also used social networks to communicate with their audiences.

Social Networking Sites

Since about one-in-five Americans (22%) (and two-thirds of Americans ages 18-29) is a member in an online social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook, candidates needed to use such networks to deliver their messages to the public. These findings emphasize the relevance and strength of such online communities.

27% of younger Americans (including 37% of those ages 18-24) say that they have received information about candidates and the campaign from them on social networking sites. Nearly one-in-ten of people under age 30 (8%) say that they have become a friend of one of the candidates on a site. The numbers are even higher for each of these activities amongst young registered voters.

Older voters have been found to be less politically active on social networks. About one-in-five Americans ages 30-39 (21%) use social networking sites, but just 4% in this age group say that they have received campaign information from those sites; 3% have become friends with a candidate.

The Strength of Online Videos

Online videos have played a huge part in this election campaign. 24% of Americans say they have seen either a speech, interview, commercial, or debate online. 41% of those under age 30 have viewed some sort of video online. The percentage goes down as the age groups get older, but even amongst those ages 65 and older, 7% have seen an election video online.

Views of Political Bias on the Web

13% of web users say there are more news websites and blogs that favor the Democrats, while 6% of users say more sites favor the Republicans. However the general view (45%) is that there about equal numbers of news and opinion websites on both sides.
Since 36% of web users didn’t even respond to the question, it seems that about 81% don’t perceive of any general political tilt on the internet. These same findings were found amongst those respondents who get most of their campaign news online.

It’s good to see that people, especially those who use the internet as their main news source, feel that they get an equal amount of information on the Web regarding both sides. This presents the Web as an increasingly relevant source of news.  

Overall I think these findings show the increasing importance of the Web as a news source and the significance of social sites as a tool for politicians to deliver their messages to the public. There is incredible power vested within sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. When making voting decisions, people will take into account how the candidates are represented on each of these platforms. To illustrate this point, the findings even tell the story of Senator George Allen who had lost the the 2006 race for the U.S. Senate seat in Virginia due to a YouTube video which circulated at the time showing him mocking an Indian-American campaign worker. Today we are able to receive more news from more sources than ever before and hopefully this should also allow us to make more calculated and intelligent voting decisions.

In the last week I had traveled to NYC where I had the pleasure of attending Stephanie Agresta’s Birthday 2.0 party. Stephanie is also a social media expert and we connected online through Facebook and emails in the last year. It is always exciting for me to meet my online friends face to face for the first time. I am a big believer in extending online connections to the offline world and since I am living in Israel and many of my connections are based in the United States and Europe, connecting offline is often hard but always very fulfilling.

I came back to Israel just in time to attend Jeff Pulver’s social networking party for his Facebook friends last night. The place was packed with people from the Web 2.0 industry and gave us all a great opportunity to do some business networking in an amazing social setting. Throughout the night various people came up to me and expressed how much they enjoyed reading my blog. This was the highlight of the night for me. There is nothing more fulfilling than hearing from your readers that they enjoy your writing and learn from it. I hope I continue to interest you with my posts.

Here are some pics from last night’s event:

In this pic: Nimrod Lehavi, Liron Lev, Ron Shoshani

In this pic: Liron Lev, Michal, Yaniv Golan, Dror Gill

In this pic: Liron Lev, me, Dror GIll

Thanks to Niv Calderon for taking the shot of Jeff and me.

Technorati tags: social networking, stephanie agresta, social media, facebook, jeff pulver, web 2.0, blog, nimrod lehavi, liron lev, ron shoshani, Yaniv Golan, Dror Gill, niv calderon