There’s a lot here that’s counter-intuitive. First off, if you’re a family with kids that go to school, you’re already probably fairly well-connected within your community with other families. In my experience, it’s precisely the people who are your neighbors, that you meet at the soccer game, that go to school with your kids, etc. that become your life-long friends. If you can’t find compatible friends and develop relationships with some of the people that you’re constantly around, I’d be surprised because those people are the typical candidates.

John argues that the people you already know in the community may not share all your common interests. Fair enough. A few points about this:

- If your kids go to school, they play a huge role in which families you socialize with. They choose their friends and as a parent, you can either develop relationships with their friends and their friends’ families or you can push them further away from you by disapproving of their friends. In my experience, even people that are very different usually share some common interests, values, etc. If you have a checklist of lots of criteria that you “require” families you associate with to have, you might as well move to a small, homogeneous town so that you don’t have to worry about associating with people that many have differences.

- People that are passionate about some topic or issue (religion, politics, charity, etc.) most likely already participate in community events (church, volunteer work, etc.) that connect them with others in the community that share common interests. If I’m very religious, my family goes to church every Sunday. If I’m into volunteer work and charity, I’m a member of the Rotary Club and take my family to the local Rotary Club gatherings. Thus, unless you live in a metropolitan region with millions of people, it’s very likely that you don’t need to go on to FriendsForFamilies.com to locate families in your area with these shared interests. You already know them!

Services like Match.com are great because when you’re looking for somebody to date and potentially develop a romantic relationship with, efficiency is important. There is utility in being able to use technology to filter out people that you know you wouldn’t be compatible with. You don’t want to deal with poor candidates. I’d say the dynamic of relationship development for friendships, especially between families, is not the same. Common ground is established over time through your repeated socializing in an offline environment. You find out about their kids, their beliefs, their religion by getting to know them over time by repeated interactions, not by interviewing them via email through a site like FriendsForFamilies.com. Again, these types of relationships are often developed through the friends your children make and through your participation in community activities. The brutual efficiency of “family matchmaking” ignores the social dynamic of how these relationships are best developed.

Does that mean there’s no market for this service? No. It may appeal to some people. But on the business development side, I think charging $20/year right off the bat when the service won’t have any utility until it reaches critical mass is a strategy mistake that will thwart any chance of success this has. I understand that the payment aspect serves as a form of quality control to make prospective customers feel more secure, however when weighed against the fact that for $20 I’m basically getting access to a service that won’t be of any value to me with its current userbase, I’m would not tempted enough to join. A better plan for dealing with the “chicken-egg” problem is needed here.

I wanted to take a minute and just offer some points of clarification from FriendsForFamilies.com’s perspective. Hopefully this will give people an objective view of why we’re launching the service. These are really just counterpoints to some of the comments above:

1) It seems that some people view this as a service for “anti-social” or “lonely” families. While it can serve in that capacity, it’s not what was intended when we started working on this idea. We wanted to create a set of tools that could be used by every family to make finding friends a more efficient process. It’s true that the Internet is probably a major cause of why people don’t socialize as much as they used to. However, it’s our goal to use technology and the Internet to help people meet “Great” friends in their communities, not just the neighbor or other soccer moms that might not have that much in common with their own family. Meeting your neighbors or other parents at a school function is not the same as meeting those rare people that eventually turn into life-long friendships. You can’t exactly go up to people out in your community and start asking them about their kids, their beliefs, their religion, etc. Our site does allow you to do these things. It’s simply a tool that helps families establish significant common ground before meeting. Again, it makes the process more efficient.

2) Security. By the time we launch tomorrow, we’ll have all our security information posted on the site. This will explain a lot of concerns people have here about family safety. Of course this is a top priority of our company and we strive to protect every area where we can. I’ll hit on a couple of security points here.
- Requiring membership prior to viewing families offers traceability. The price is not a deterrent to “predators”, it’s the ability to trace back to a verified user, address and credit card number. By doing this, every user that is viewing other family profiles knows that they aren’t doing so anonymously.
- We log all user activity. Every page that every member views on our site is stored in a log. We can see which family profiles each member is viewing.
- We log all member communication. Our communication system provides anonymous access to talk back and forth between families. However, we store a record of that communication and know what each member has sent to other members.
- Like a couple of people have noticed (thanks for signing up!), no contact information is ever revealed to any other user on the site. You can browse profiles of families in your area but there is no way you can identify who that family is or how to find them with the data that is published. You have to communicate with the family and arrange all that on your own (which is logged and stored).

These are just a few precautions we took to ensure family safety. We understand some people may have problems with this from a privacy perspective. The fact is we know we are dealing with families, we think legitimate families will understand and we think they will appreciate the extra efforts we went to so that we could provide as much safety as possible to their families. We also think by openly communicating these policies, it will serve as a major deterrent for “predators”. If they know that we know who they are, where they are located, what profiles they are browsing and what communication they are sending to what members, it seems very unlikely they would use the service.

Hopefully this sheds a little more light on the two main issues which were the membership structure and security. Take care guys and once again, thanks for all the feedback. We can definitely use it to help us communicate all the great things we are doing.

John McAuley, CEO
http://www.FriendsForFamilies.com

I read tons online, and I still get magazines in the mail. I’ve got 100-plus cable channels, and I still watch some shows on the old networks.

I think FriendsForFamilies.com is supplemental and all social networking will be. Some of my single girlfriends are signed up to match-making sites, and they continue to go out to bars and chamber of commerce networking events and arts festivals and whatnot.

Maybe my libertarianism is keeping me from seeing something but I think Friends for Families and other social networking sites are just expansions of the means available to us, that allow us to seek what we want in a variety of ways. More choices, more liberty.

I joined and liked that the questionnaires were all oriented toward activities people do together, outside the home, just like I remember my parents taking me and my sister to picnics and events with other families they knew from work or wherever. Those were positive experiences 99 percent of the time.

This is a shame, parents driving their kids to school. Even when they do not live that far. I learned more about life walking to and from school than in school. Parents are robbing their kids of this experience because of the fear of freaks and crazy neighbors. Even when you get involved with your community, you have to watch out for freeloaders. These people are no more a stranger than someone you meet online.

This matchmaking for families started a few years back as a university project, I saw it and was also going to improve it but I am not that interested in other families - just mine for now. And that is where “hooking up” families fail, nobody is craving other family companionships to snuggle up to.

The FFF also made a mistake by not showing how many families have joined and how many are even in your neighborhood. The FAQ response regarding “try it for 12 months…” shows there is nobody on there if you can’t find a match.

It’s called the nursery, the school or the high-school. It’s should sound pretty obvious, but when you go and pick up your son or daughter from school you are actually surrounded by opportunities to make potential friends. And if you find the ’school run’ too stressful to properly meet people, what about the evenings or weekend events such as schoolplays and such?

Now say instead you go online - you’re searching for people in your area with kids your age. Guess who you’re likely to find? Yup, the same people from school. The mind boggles.

Las parejas que no tienen amigos podrán, a partir del 19 de septiembre, hacer nuevas amistades en http://www.FriendsForFamilies.com, la página web dedicada a las familias que quieren enlazar amistades con otras familias. La idea nace de un estudio que desve…

Yes. Much safer to meet at a family BBQ and use that as a front to meet women for sex. So I agree it’s a great idea. There’s nothing more exciting than a high-risk affair with some other guy’s wife because she’s not being satisfied due to his workaholic tendencies.

“Mommy, why are you in bed kissing daddy’s friend?”

This is one more example of how I would never have come up with a good, new idea.

heh

Also Michael, I really enjoyed seeing you speak at the Future of Web Apps summit this week. I was the one who asked about the Apple press incident. Just wanted to thank you for the great information and insight.

Friends For Families, a sort of match.com for families, quotes a study that says 25% of people claim that that they have no close personal friends. They aim to help families find other, compatible families to establish friendships. At its core it’s a…