familetime

Close to a year ago, a friend of mine approached me about being part of a focus group for a product called familetime.  She gave me a little run down on the product and i was in!  Her brother-in-law is the man behind the product – Chris Hatcher.

 

Here is a little bit about the site (taken from the site)…

Familetime allows you to share family experiences today while recording lasting memories for tomorrow. With familetime, you can post photos, create messages and blogs, review the schedules of other family members, record family history and a whole lot more.

I was sold immediately – somewhere we can post pictures we don’t want on facebook, record memories we want our children to have access to, have a family calendar so I am not texting everyone on the day of a school program… I couldn’t sign up fast enough! 

Chris explained how this idea came about when he posted a video on youtube of his youngest child (1 of 3 boys) saying the pledge of allegience – mostly because he thought it was cute, wanted to show family, and couldn’t figure out any other way to share the video.  After the video has 200+ hits he took it off!  That is NOT what he had intended and he wished he could share things with his family without the world seeing it.

I will give you a little tour using snapshots from my family’s familetime.

Home page:

As you can see, to the left are all the family members (you can include as many or as few as you’d like) here I have included My mom & dad, my two sisters and their husbands, along with all our children.  You create an account for each child and I will get to why in the next few screen shots! Notice the pictures in the middle top section above – you can add photos to your own account and tag family members in them, the last 20 photos uploaded are available for viewing by scrolling through with the arrows at the top of the page.

Notice the refrigerator – it’s like a wall – you can “talk” here.

Next, I clicked on the Calendar to view our family’s calendar.  As you can see, there are a few events listed.  When these events are within a 7 day window from today’s date – they show up on the homepage (above) to the right under familevents.  My older sister (with kids) & I love to use it to “book” our parents to keep kids :)

Click on the recipes tab and the following window appears!  This is one of my favorites…I can’t tell you how many emails have passed between me, sisters, and my mom regarding recipes.  We’ve just gotten started but I hope to have the page filled pretty soon and then no more questioning about recipes – they will all be there for the fam to see!

If you click the “add recipe” button above the following window appears

so easy to add your recipes!

Next tab: famileblog.  I don’t have a screen shot for that but it is just that – a blog for the family!

NOW!  Here comes in the family record keeping! Remember when I said that you make an account for each child – this is why. You can click on one of the family members listed on the left hand side and it’s that individuals personal life book.  Here, I have logged in as Mills so I could update her familetime account.  But really, if I wanted to just view her details I could’ve stayed logged in as me and just clicked her picture.

 

As you can see, there are different categories to add info.  The idea is that when Mills is old enough, she will have control over her familetime page but will be able to see (and retain) all the info I added over her childhood.  When you add photos you can “tag” other family members in the photos so that it shows up in their familetime categories.

Next, I logged in as MJ because she wanted to add to her “Wish List” – her FAVORITE part. 

How wonderful for the grandparents, aunts, uncles to see this for Christmas! 

There is much more to come for familetime! In the future look for a History Section (In Memoriam, Medical and Written HiStories) and an ICE Box (“in case of emergencies” section). 

Go sign up today, you’ll be glad you did!  Oh and only one person pays for the account ($9.95/month or $85 for the first year), you add the rest of the family members and they enjoy familetime for free.