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"Name: Rootsy\nQuick Pitch: Share photos, invites and stories with family members only. \nGenius Idea: Rootsy lets you connect to family members on a private social network to share things that might be too personal to post on Facebook. \nFrustrated with existing social networks and over-sharing personal family moments, a group of seven entrepreneurs at tech incubator QLabs in New York City developed a site called Rootsy. \nRootsy is a new social networking site that limits your connections to family members. So baby photos, reunion announcements and other information you might not want to share on Facebook can only be seen by select family members. \n\"People have their Facebook personality and are trying to create an image for themselves,\" said one of the founders of Rootsy,  Cezary Pietrzak. \"We're going for higher-value type of content.\" \nLaunched last Wednesday, Rootsy's founders said they wanted to create something to address the problem of the lack of privacy  and intimacy with current social networking sites. Rootsy lets you build a digital family tree and contact those family members. \nHere's how it works: Add yourself the the family tree. Then you can add a spouse, sibling, parent or child. When you add this person to your digital tree, you can invite them to the network by entering their email address. Once they join, they can invite other family members to Rootsy, too and help your grow the tree, or you can add all the family members yourself. The person who starts the tree is the admin, but down the road Rootsy will add functionality for other people to manage the tree. And any family member can post or share something with the group. \nUsers will receive notifications when major family events occur, and all this information is kept private. No one else outside your family tree can view what you post on Rootsy. The site doesn't allow syncing to Facebook or Twitter to prevent over-sharing personal details. \nFamilies can be complicated but Rootsy has built-in most of the members a person might want to include in their tree \u2014 including someone with divorces, in-laws and same-sex spouses. It does not let you include step children or an ex spouse for yourself (it does let you include exes of people higher in your family tree). You can also branch out to your second cousin.\n\n\nThe site is free to use. Pietrzak said if they do ever charge users for features on Rootsy, it will be in conjunction with partnership \u2014 something like printing photos or other interesting brand integrations, so long as it's not interruptive. \nPietrzak tells Mashable they don't want to be the next Ancestry.com, but if users begin to ask questions about their ancestry, they'll consider a partnership. The site wants to focus on the intimate social networking aspect rather than researching family members. (Path, founded in 2010, is another a social network that limits users' friends to 150 people. Its creators also wanted a more personal social network than Facebook.)\nRootsy was developed by the QLabs tech incubator, backed by AOL, in Noho, New York. Would you use Rootsy? Tell us in the comments. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, monkeybusinessimages"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/09/04/rootsy/>