How the Site Works

Steve and his daughter, Sally, have just registered as new All My Folks members. They have many friends and family members, but we’re going to concentrate on Uncle Bob.

Make a Connection

Steve decides he wants to share information with Bob so he searches for his email address in the Search for Members page. If Bob is already a member he can also search by Bob’s name and city. If Bob is not a member we can send him an email on Steve’s behalf inviting him to join the site. If Bob is already a member, we’ll put a note on his home page telling him that Steve has invited him to make a connection.

Managed Disclosure

After we send Bob’s invitation, we ask Steve how much information he wants to share with Bob if he accepts. He can make stories available to Bob in any of 13 topical categories.

Steve decides that Bob can read stories relating to his career, hobbies, and sports. He then sets his daughter’s permissions so that Uncle Bob may only read stories about her school and hobbies.

Depending on who’s looking, Steve can display his full street address or just his city and state. He can also show birthday information as month and day, or with his age at his next birthday. He might even decide to display his age only when he hits decade milestones. Anniversary information can be presented with the same options.

Topical Storytelling

Earlier, Steve had posted a few stories about himself and Sally on the site. Each story is classified according to the person it’s about and the topics it covers. For example:

Steve’s first story, about his hole-in-one yesterday, is set as being about Steve. He checks off the sports and general (it’s a big deal) categories for this story.

The second story, about when Steve tipped over the punch bowl at Sally’s high-school graduation, is set as being about both Steve and Sally. He sets the topic categories to school, family, and humor.

Filtered Reception

On the other side of the country, Uncle Bob is excited to hear from his nephew and accepts his invitation to make a connection. Now Bob has access to all stories relating to Steve’s career, hobbies, and sports; and information about Sally’s school and hobbies. There are two areas where Bob can read them:

If he is really interested in Steve’s career developments he will check the career topic in the Information In section of his Connections page. This will place any story related to Steve’s career on his front page. Bob also checks Email Update so that he’ll get a copy of Steve’s career stories delivered to his email.

Bob can also check on Steve’s name in the site, which will take him to a page with all of Steve’s stories on career, hobbies, and sports. It will also show Steve’s photo, address, birthday, and anniversary.

Date Reminders

Bob decides that he’d like to send Christmas cards to Steve and Sally, as well as Father’s Day cards to Steve. In the same Information In section where he decided what topics he wanted on his front page, Bob checks a variety of special dates where he wants to be reminded to send a card or gift. Ten days before the event, we email Bob a reminder of the dates with a list of people he has selected for cards.

Easy Email Publishing

While Steve enjoys visiting our site often, he doesn’t always want to log in just to register his latest thought or note Sally’s latest achievement. Although writing stories on the site is easy, Steve prefers to just send us a note by email. Our automated mail system reads his message, assigns it a topic, and even figures out whether it’s about Steve, Sally, or both of them.