Famster Offers Family Websites, Blogs and Video Sharing

Posted on August 20, 2006

Famster is a new family-oriented homepage service that includes blogs, video sharing and many other features. A Mashable post details so of the site's many features.

You start by creating your page and deciding which elements to make public or private. You can then customize the look of your Famster using the "theme park" - a gallery of themes to spruce up your site. Next, drop in to the Character Studio to create animated avatars of your family members. There�s also a photo album, a blogging tool, a filing cabinet for your file uploads, a guestbook, a scrapbook, a calendar, a family tree, a way to share your recipes, a video-sharing feature, an address book and free webmail (whew!). Additionally, Famster offers an RSS reader, but you can only choose from pre-selected feeds, which seems fairly useless. One last feature is obviously designed to capitalize on hysteria over MySpace predators - you can search for sex offenders in your area and even receive alerts when new offenders are added. It's hard to comment on that without getting political, but I'm just not sure what value (if any) this provides - apart from propogating a culture of fear.

While Famster does look like it has many valuable features we have to agree with Mashable that having the entire site designed completely in Flash is a turn-off. Parents will like the security features of the site that allow the use of passwords and approving instant messanging senders. AOL built a lot of its early popularity with parental features and a blogging and social networking company might be able to duplicate that success online by focusing on similar concepts. TechnologyExpert has more about this latest entry in the crowded family website market.