New Branch in Genealogy Web Sites

Social networks connect friends, but what about family?

Ilya Nikolayev, co-founder of Familybuilder, came up with a solution last year when he created Family Tree, a social-networking application that brings together relatives across major platforms including News Corp. (STOCK QUOTE: NWS) MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and Orkut.

Familybuilder launched when Facebook opened up its application programming interface and quickly expanded to other major social networks. It now serves nearly 4.5 million users and projects 2008 revenue of half a million dollars. Nikolayev moved from Russia to the U.S. as communism fell in 1989.

"Many of my relatives died in the Second World War," says Nikolayev, "so I was always interested in tracing my family roots."

But unlike other genealogy Web sites like Ancestry.com, which focus on discovering deceased relatives, Familybuilder harvests the power of social networks to reconnect users with living family members and perhaps some forgotten or unknown distant relatives.

"Our theory was that you could build a very robust family-tree application with a minimal amount of effort because that information already exists within the social networks," says Nikolayev. "We realized that if we managed to launch applications across the social networks, we could build out a network of apps that allow you to find and connect to relatives within the hundreds of millions of profiles that exist."

Coding an application for Facebook is one thing, but being an entrepreneur and turning that free application into a business entails much more work. "We started as a small app and then grew to a fairly large app," says Nikolayev. "We found that the application began to slow down."