AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, March 8 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- ZOOOF.COM, a leading online genealogy service and social networking website announces the launch of its family trees website, available in 35 languages.
Built on the theory of "six degrees" of separation, in which all individuals are supposedly connected to one another in some way by no more than "six degrees" of relationships, ZOOOF.COM is striving to break down cultural and political barriers to show the connections.
Following a successful 'invitation-only' trial period, ZOOOF.COM is now open to all. Anyone can join and in true viral fashion, individuals have the opportunity to build their family trees online adding other family members. Each member creates a profile and can build upon the effort created by the family's 'founder', extending the family to other families and geographies.
Jean-Paul Busker, CEO, ZOOOF.COM, commented, "Our goal is to bring people closer together through family and show how closely related they are to others, including celebrities, heroes and royalty. The internet has enabled the interactive family tree to become a reality."
ZOOOF members can also discover, expand and maintain family ties in a wide variety of ways: by tracing their ancestry, building a contemporary interactive family tree, inviting family members to a private environment, chatting, mailing, sharing, and writing a biography, and immortalizing their family history.
Over the coming months, ZOOOF.COM plans to introduce several new features and tools, including the option of uploading genealogy files and continued improvement of its current Web-based software. It already has an interactive game, 'ZOOOF Explorers', in which players hand flags to other members around the world to generate points, spreading ZOOOF's message of "we're all one big family".
Co-founder Jean-Paul Busker came up with the idea for ZOOOF.COM in 2005 when he decided he wanted to start his own modern art project with the goal of uniting the world via 12 family "levels." At the time he was an art gallery owner in Amsterdam allowing people to vote on the Internet to decide what works they wanted to see in the physical gallery. Fascinated about a story he'd heard about Six Degrees he began to wonder about the 'real degrees' of life and started ZOOOF as an art project with co-founder Stefan Leenen, a computer science student.