MyFamily.com

» see myfamily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A million people signed up for MyFamily inside its first 140 days, which in 1999 was a serious number, and nearly all of them were American families who had decided that the way to stay in touch was a password-protected website with the family surname at the top of it.

The idea came from Paul B. Allen, no relation to the Microsoft one, who ran Ancestry.com as its chief executive through 1997 and 1998 and spun MyFamily out of it that December. Each family got a site: a shared photo album, a message board, a calendar with everyone's birthdays already on it, a recipe section. Free to start, paid once you wanted real storage. It worked so well that on 17 November 1999 the parent company renamed itself after the product. Ancestry.com, Inc. became MyFamily.com, Inc., and stayed that way until 6 July 2009, when it changed back.

In Turkey in 1999 none of this computed. My family had one phone line and one machine sitting on it, and the relatives I might have shared an album with lived close enough to visit on a Sunday. The American version of the problem had a different shape: cousins spread across four states and grandparents who had retired to Florida. MyFamily was built for that geography.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

For two years it was enormous. More than $90 million in venture money went in, and across 2000 and 2001 MyFamily was the most used photo-sharing site on the web, a sentence that reads strangely now. Flickr did not exist yet. Neither did Facebook. If you wanted thirty relatives and nobody else looking at pictures of a niece's birthday, this was close to the only way to arrange it, and Ancestry's subscription archive sat underneath collecting the family names you typed in.

What took the use case away was free. Facebook absorbed the private family album without charging anyone for it, and by 2010 the thirty relatives were already logged in over there. Ancestry kept MyFamily running another four years on a shrinking budget.

~ what got buried with it ~

The retirement was announced in the summer of 2014 with the date set for 5 September. There was an export path: photos out as JPEG files, discussion threads flattened into text. On paper that is a responsible shutdown. In practice a lot of people could not make it work or did not hear about it until the window had shut, and Spokt, a competitor, sold a scraping tool for a flat $69 that only functioned while the old site was still answering requests.

Slate published a piece in April 2015 by a user whose ten years of family history had gone with the switch-off. Ancestry's whole business was preserving family records across centuries. The records it was holding in its own hands lasted fifteen years.

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