Who Says The Web Can't Substitute Your Family? Try Wamily For One.
Given the slew of social networking sites, to not belong to any one seems unthinkable! E-mails that kindled friendships and located long-lost friends have now morphed into social networking sites that go that wee bit further to form a network of friends, knitting people globally through a network of communities. Orkut, Myspace, Facebook, Secondlife…there is no dearth of choice.
And now, jumping onto the bandwagon is Wamily, an amalgam of Web + Family.
Wamily? What's a Wamily?
According to the company, Wamily takes off where social networking sites end. This is a customizable, community application tool, based on the Wiki technology. An invitation only site, once in, the user can set up his own Wamily, a personal platform for interacting, sharing messages, pictures, videos and web feeds.
As killerstartups.com puts it
A family on the web is a….feb? A fameb? How about a wamily? A wamily is an online space where a group of people can share, interact, meet, plan, and play. You can create a wamily for any group: friends, family, teams, organizations, social groups, church groups, towns, clubs. On the Wamily site you log-in to your group, and there you can use the site's easy tools to share stuff like messages, pics, videos, ideas and web feeds.
This young company, started in 2006, is founded by 2 business school buddies from Emory University. Since then, it has become a team of 4 talented web professionals, and they are still on the look out for more. Totally self-funded, plans are to use advertising and paid premium features for further funding. Currently Wamily supports Firefox, IE, Netscape 8 onwards, Opera 9 upwards and Safari 2 or newer.
Being a relatively new tool, there's not much in terms of rating, however a word of advice from Mashable
Nevertheless, with all the options for modules, a Wamily page can get crowded very quickly. There's no way to hide them - they're either on your page, or deleted. Some may find the scroll bars in every module a bit cumbersome. And being in alpha means there are some bugs to work out, especially regarding the options for profile customization.
It's hard to define the competition, however sites like Profil3, an online community around gaming where you meet other gamers or Famiva the perfect family site, which hopes to bring families together online, are sure to give Wamily a run for its money. Widen the canvass and names like Wetpaint crop up as possible alternatives.
One To One With Wamily
Wamily is a very unique name. How did you come up with it?
It fell into our lap ... and actually the name helped shape the product. Last year when my co-founder Hyaat and I first came up with the idea for Wamily, we knew we wanted to build a customizable, community-focused app, but we didn't really know how it would work at the beginning. We were both up late one night talking to each other over the phone, searching on GoDaddy for domain names for our new idea -- looking for names that used words like 'community', 'family', 'page'. Eventually, Hyaat found wamily.com, and we both immediately thought "web family". It was perfect, and this concept of web family helped keep us focused on what the product should be.
What does the Wamily brand mean?
The name Wamily comes from the idea of a "web family". Wamily is a social collaboration site, which combines collaborative content tools like conversation boards and wikis -- with social networking. You can create a wamily page for any group, club, team, family ... and allow everybody to communicate and share messages, photos, links, etc.
What will Wamily look for in terms of technical & IT skills in the near future?
We're always looking for sharp Ruby on Rails developers and Interface/CSS gurus that are excited about working in a startup environment. Right now we're still trying to raise enough money to have a real office and hire real employees -- but when that comes we're going to want to ramp up quickly.
How do you use your blog to communicate to members and the public?
You really have to listen to your users (and potential users) from the very beginning, and adapt your business to what people really want. A blog is an easy and really effective way to communicate to our users. It helps users understand that there are real people behind Wamily, listening to what they want.
How do you encourage first time visitors to start a Wamily?
Usually when somebody joins, it's because they're invited by somebody already using the site. Once you've joined one wamily, it's easy to see how useful it could be for another purpose, and it's even easier to start a new wamily.
Wamily is currently open by invitation only. What type of users would you like to give Wamily a try?
We're still pretty early on in our product development, so we're limiting registration at the time. We are looking for web-savvy groups that want to give our alpha product a try, though. If you're looking for a tool to manage communication in a social group, send us a note and we'll help you get set up.
Where do you see wiki sites and social collaboration sites going in the next 2-3 years?
I don't think any of your readers would argue that wikis and other online collaboration tools are very useful in many ways. But, I think they are still very unknown concepts to the average internet user. I still get many, many people who ask me, "what's a wiki?" Sites like Wamily are lowering the hurdles for your average person to actually use a wiki, not just for consuming information, but also for creating and sharing information. These types of tools are in early stages of adoption still, but if I can help it -- in 2 to 3 years a "wiki" will be just as common as "email".
Wamily Rocks Or Not?
I opened a Wiki some time back and while it was really easy to use, it wasn't that simple to get friends to log in and share the Wiki. So a Wiki that combines social networking features like writing scraps or sending messages is probably the next logical move. The only problem is retaining that USP for long enough, on the surface for example, Wamily sounds a lot like Wet Paint, though its application and features are a lot more varied. Our advice is to step on the marketing and make it synonymous for the genre, before some other Wamily or Fameb comes waltzing in.