Kindo Family Blog

When I have heard about the Barcamp at Lake Constance I knew straight away that I wanted to go there. After all I grew up only 20 kilometers from the lake.
Finally the barcamp took place yesterday and today at the brand new venue of Zeppelin University. Some of the top bloggers and internet thinkers around Germany, Switzerland and Austria were present, like Robert Basic, Jan Theofel and obviously the organiser Oliver Gassner. I gave a session on the internationalisation of webservices, talking about Kindo and some of our experiences while getting this service live in 16 languages!

Thanks for the huge attendance and good feedback! Hope I will see some of you guys again soon. And maybe some of you barcampers gave Kindo a try

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Yesterday the Kindo team released Norwegian, which now means that Kindo is available in 16 languages.

Thanks a lot to Eirik, who did all the translations voluntarily! It’s great to see how big and international our Kindo family has become and that there are so many committed people.

If you have a Norwegian surname, and would like to find out some interesting facts about your families origin then visit the Norwegian lastname pages .

Kindo just launched in Danish! Our last name research pages for Denmark have been live for quite some time now, and finally we have launched Kindo in Danish! It should soon be available via http://kindo.dk as well.

The new language was made possible by Aske and Brian who have translated the whole website voluntarily. Brian had got it rolling and Aske finished it off. Thanks a lot for your help guys!

The new Danish version takes our language toll to 15! The Kindo family is spreading the globe

Some nice improvments on the navigation bar on the Kindo tree. The English users are enjoying it for quite some time already, but now it is live in all languages, so we wanted to let you all know about it.

We have redesigned the zoom bar and have split if of from the info box. The info box now shows the tree creator as well as the person, who’s tree you are seeing at the moment. And you still find the number of people in your tree there.

The zoom bar is now semi-transparent allowing you to still read whatever is underneath. It is ordered vertically and includes some navigation arrows at the bottom, so you now have three ways of moving the tree around:

• drag and drop the canvas to move it around
• click on the arrows to move the tree around
• use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate

And in the middle of the arrows there is a “home” button, which you can use to get back of the person, whose tree it is.

What a great effort again from our development team! Though half the team is on holiday or honeymoon, we can now present the brand new and wonderful family photo albums. It’s only the first step to more media sharing features for Kindo but already easy to use and:

• quicker than posting printouts
• doesn’t congest your email inbox
• unlimited photo upload
• only accessible to your relatives
• from any computer with internet connection, at any time

Using it is self-explanatory, but we still want to tell you about it in every detail: In the Kindo main navigation you now find a dark blue Photo tab.

Step 1: Name and describe your album

Just click on “Upload photos” and you can start your album straight away: Give it a name, tell your relatives where everything took place and you can even give a brief description of what the album is all about or start sharing some gossip. Share pictures of your graduation or your birthday, holidays abroad or christmas at home or simply your last Sunday on the couch.

Step 2: Upload photos

Just click on browse and select the pic you want to upload, doubleclick or enter, and the same for the next one. It’s quite comfortable unless you want to upload hundreds of pictures to the same album (we will soon be working on an advanced uploader for those cases ). Once you got all photographic memories selected, just click upload and that is almost it.

Step 3: Organise and arrange

You can now easily drag around photos to rearrange the order in which they will appear later on. The first picture will become the album cover! Just hit save when you are done and that’s it.

By the way: You can always flip back and forth between the edit album, upload photos or organise section. And you can even add more photos or rearrange everything later on, and you can even add photos to your relatives albums! So you can put together all the pics that several people took during the common Easter holiday.

And the best thing is that all your family members will get to know about your new photos through the family newsfeed. With one click they can go there, flip through the album and leave you comments.

Finally: We have an official press release about the family photo albums as well. You can find it on our press page.

Great news: We have improved the way that Kindo resizes the picture you upload!

Flip-side: Since we want to bring this features to all the profile pictures in your trees - we decided to give Kindo a short lunch break while we are processing the image database.

Your family tree will be back to nomal (but in a better version) before you even notice!

Update: Back in business!

The contact importer on Kindo is now online and fully tested. It makes it much easier for you to invite your relatives to your tree as you can now automatically draw their emailaddresses from your existing address books at webmail services like GMail, Hotmail or Yahoo or even from your email clients like Outlook Express or Thunderbird.

Our software developpers have really done an amazing job here. It’s a great improvement, as you do not have to type in all the email addresses manually anymore, and the system will even try to match the names from your address book to the relatives in your Kindo tree. But lets go through the simple three-step-process in detail:

Let’s imagine you are William and have built a small tree of your close family, like this one.

You have invited your brother Harry already, but don’t want to type all the others’ emails again. And actually you are emailing them regularly anyway, so the addresses are all there in your webmail account!

Step 1: Select webmail service and enter login details

Well, now you just go to the yellow invite - tab and click on “import from your favourite webmail service”. You select which webmail service you want to import from; we offer a long list with services from all over the world, so William’s : The three big ones Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, followed by this long list in alphabetical order: AOL, Fastmail, Freenet, GMX, ICQmail, Indiatimes, Interia, Libero, LinkedIn, Lycos, .mac, mail.com, mail.ru, mynet, O2, Rambler, Rediffmail, Sapo, T-Online, web.de, WPPL, yahoo.jp and Yandex.

You just enter your login details for your webmail and select with the small box, if you want to keep your address book details in Kindo, so it’s available once you have added more relatives to the tree. All the data is transmitted securely and we will NOT store the login details for your webmail service at all! So neither Charles nor you have to worry about data protection issues; by the way you can find our detailed privacy policy here. Just hit next and…

Kindo will import your relatives’ email addresses automatically (Step 2)

Nothing much you need to do here, except maybe waiting for a couple of seconds in case you have a really huge address book. You will then be dropped to step 3, where you confirm that the matched persons are your relatives and can send the invites.

Step 3: Confirm the matched relatives and send invites

Kindo will mark people in red, if there are exact matches with people in your tree. You just need to click on “select family member” and Kindo will show you the matched person’s name (that you can alter, in case it shouldn’t be correct). Do the same for people that have not been recognized and select their identity manually, like Williams did for Charles in this case

You find the suggested text for the invitations below the list of names and can make some changes to title or text. Just hit “send invitations” when you like the text and you are done. Like for manual invitations you should see the green box on the profiles that you have invited on the bright blue our tree - tab. And you can see the status of your invites on the invitation history page, below the yellow invite tab. But once your relatives join that news will appear in the family news feed on the dark-greenish our family - tab

So invite your relatives to join Kindo and you can share the fun of a common place for sharing thoughts and memories!

If you’re an English speaker, refrech Kindo - there’s a little surprise waiting for you… And more still to come while we translate it…

Any feedback would be most appreciated of course!!!

kindo, family, photos

We’re busy working on photos as we type (so to blog ;-)) and have some questions we’d like to throw out to the Kindo family…

So without further ado, here they are:

• What online photo services do you use?
• How many photos do you expect to upload to Kindo?
• What kindo of video media are you using?

Please feel free to leave comments on this post, or to post your thoughts and ideas in the forum…

Thanks in advance!!
gareth

photo credit: tommyotago

photo credit: majorvols

photo credit: ediepeters

kindo, photos, family

I’ve always been fascinated by apes and monkeys, without quite understanding why.
The opening chapter of Jared Diamonds book “The Third Chimpanzee” presents one explanation.

According to him, and according to other studies, there are good reasons to put the chimpanzee in the human family tree. Scientists claim that the chimp is more closely related to humans than they are to the gorillas, and should be put in the same genus as us.

According to an National Geographic article about the same subject, “studies indicate that humans and chimps are between 95 and 98.5 percent genetically identical”, and “researchers argue that humans and chimp lineages evolutionarily diverged from one another between five and six million years ago”.

I know this is an explosive subject, and I’m not enough of an expert to really say what’s fact and what’s fiction. (Gareth probably could though, since he’s a trained zoologist).

But when I study photos of chimpanzees, and my own cousin living in here London, I clearly see similarities.