Gathering your family together can take quite an effort. Now there is an option just a few clicks away. New internet community Kindo enables users to build their own family tree and invite their families to add more profiles.

Kindo started as an idea among IT entrepreneurs working in London, away from their families. The idea was to use modern technology to bring families closer.

Martin Sandberg at Kindo says it is about building a social network – but unlike sites such as Facebook and MySpace, Kindo targets families exclusively and offers users a new way to stay in touch with their loved ones.

“Kindo is probably the most international family social network because it is available in 14 different languages; for example Arabic, Chinese, Turkish and Russian,” Sandberg says. “Kindo is about staying in touch and sharing experiences with your family rather than about genealogy. So it’s more like a Facebook for the family than a family research site.”

Sandberg says Kindo is easy to use and the tree can grow quickly. When he and his brother started building their family tree they added 40 profiles, and just two days later the tree had grown to include 83 profiles.

“There are people who have trees with more then 600 profiles already,” Sandberg says.
But what can users do except from adding profiles? Because Kindo is partnering with several e-business sites, such as CDON, internet bookstore Adlibris and flower supplier Interflora, users can send gifts to relatives. Kindo also offers a blog forum.

“One of the most important things with Kindo is to make users involved actively and to have an open dialog with them,” Sandberg says. “Through the blog forum we can communicate with our users and they can communicate about Kindo or about issues between users. Because we exist among so many cultures, with students in various countries acting as ambassadors, the blog forum also enables people to discuss and share different family related cultural experiences.”

Even though Kindo is targeting families, users already seem to be finding new creative ways of using Kindo for other purposes. A teacher in the US, who teaches Spanish, told Kindo she encouraged her students to build their family trees in English and then switch to Spanish through the language interface for training purposes and for presenting their family history in front of the class.

A French girl with relatives in Morocco said she used the language interface to communicate in Arabic, making it easier for them to add profiles. 

“Another interesting feature is the ability to create image banks,” Sandberg says. “It’s excellent for sharing pictures from big family gatherings, such birthdays or weddings. I have used it myself to create an image bank from my sister’s kid’s christening.”

So what does the future look like for Kindo? “At the moment we are focusing on having as many users as possible engaged in developing the site,” Sandberg says “But we are also looking at developing our business model by cooperating with more partners, to create better graphics and to add multimedia features. Another way of expanding could be to cooperate with the media industry.”


Hendrik Bergstén