Once upon a time a “social network for families” was launched on Dec. 26, 1998 — by a company you know as Ancestry.com.
It’s mission was TO CONNECT AND STRENGTHEN FAMILIES.
The social site was so promising it attracted nearly $100M in venture capital. It was free. It went viral. Tens of millions of people signed up.
It was so successful that we changed the name of the company from Ancestry.com to MyFamily.com, and prepared for an IPO.
By January 2001 the MyFamily.com web properties ranked #10 in the US for at-home page views. According to another study, it was the top photo sharing site in 2001.
But the dot com bubble burst and the company’s founders lost control. The investors and executives who now controlled the company started charging for MyFamily.com and left it to languish over the next fifteen years. It finally died in 2015 or 2016.
Meanwhile, another social network was started in 2004.
It started as a way to rank hot college students and connect with them.
It expanded from colleges into high schools and finally to the general public.
It’s mantra was MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS.
And break things it did.
Surely it wasn’t intended, but around a third of all divorces in the U.K. cite facebook as a contributing factor.
Surely it wasn’t intended, but Facebook seems to have broken democracy in many ways — eroded trust, amplified extreme voices — all the while selling our attention via ads to the highest bidder.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the social network that was built to CONNECT AND STRENGTHEN FAMILIES had been able to purchase myfriends.com (the owner was willing to sell it for $18,000 and the founders wanted to buy it) and been able to also CONNECT AND STRENGTHEN FRIENDSHIPS.
What would the world be like if MYFAMILY.COM had remained free and viral and had hundreds of millions of users before the MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS company even launched?
Could someone run a simulation — or produce a film like It’s A Wonderful Life — and show us all what would have happened to the world if MYFAMILY/MYFRIENDS had become the leading social network in the world instead of FACEBOOK/META?
