Old School Hockey Sweater Challenge - Olson vs Fergusson!

Since interviewing Michael Fergusson of Kinzin for Raincity Radio a few months back, and hearing his compelling discourse on participatory marketing using the ubiquitous Facebook, I've worked hard to soften my cynicism about the pervasive community aggregator.

I am (shockingly) a bit serious about how i spend leisure time and tend to think of Facebook applications as obnoxious (albeit well-meaning) hugs, squirts, pokes, trivial nonsense which requires an "ignore" to avoid participation.

The other day at Moose Camp, I caught up with Megan Cole - a Canadian classic, she's a social marketeer and my predecessor at RCS who convened a session (symposium) about Social Media marketing.

After i told her about my nutty holidays past when i invited all my brothers and families to my place in North Van, and mass photo hysteria which ensued, she told me about the new Kinzin Facebook app which has got me thinking ....

Kinzin's previous FB App "Are you Normal" grew a community from this large aggregate, and then encouraged this community to evolve the questions and results. This sort of individual engagement appeals to me and started me thinking about how groups of disparate communities can share knowledge - in bite-sized chunks - on a platform they might already be using.

But I also considered the "essential-ality" of the wildly popular "AYN?" application. While fun and interesting on its own, AYN wasn't core to Kinzin's big mission of helping families share memories - its for quibbling more than creating.

Digression: As I see it, Kinzin's personal networks allow families to share what they choose which whom they choose by allowing control of access and sharing, then they help families create curios from the content.

The new Kinzin Facebook application "These are my Kids" is really "an application" that does useful stuff! TAMKs features a clean interface and non-intimidating organization for most any level of newb - and is usable inside of, or out of, Facebook ... and Kinzin is adding more treats along the way like book printing and more.

More important is what These are my Kids does - it makes total sense to me as I've encountered a few perfect scenarios for this application way of sharing.

I've shared my family content pretty openly on a old-timey html site with a page of photos for each brother and galleries, calendars, features and so on never really worrying about who saw it. Who'd care?

I tend to be very public with my personal publishing projects (shock ;-)) and now that more of my family is online and developing professional reputations, my personal personal and family personal are sometimes at odds.

However, In order to share the private content with just family, you've got to convince far flung relatives to sign up for yet another web network and then sort through loosely-couple lists, streams and such (don't get me wrong, i dig the free form content flow - most of the time ...) which ends up requiring the dreaded family tech support mentoring phone calls.

Recently, my Mom did a huge scanning project of family archives and created printed books (through Winkflash IIRC) as a holiday gift. Since the photos and memorabilia are all scanned, the application could be a natural extension of the book. Since Kinzin is soon adding book printing direct from the app, for the next in the historical series, she could lay out and order the book right from Kinzin. Source material can come from all over as you can use your photos from Flickr, Facebook albums, or hard drive.

Since it's the Moms of the world who really the most likely to care take and distribute family photos, I've asked my Ma (yup, Mom's a blogger) to give it a spin. She replied within a half an hour having given a thorough test drive with a list of ideas:

How I Would Use These are my Kids:

1. 1. As a personal daily diary for each of you boys, from my perspective - i.e. the parade on Guam when A got his terrible sunburn, a romance break-up, wisdom teeth out, bad flu, downer day, etc.
2. To chronicle events that each of you either attended or participated in - i.e. Swim Meet, Science Fair, concerts, Senior Citizen St. Patrick's Day, graduations, etc.
3. To use a a timeline list of events pertaining to a specific incident - i.e. car wrecks, visits to lawyers, trouble at school, broken ankle diary, etc.
4. To remember special anniversaries and parties or celebrations surrounding them - i.e. birthdays, Festivus, births, death, reunions, new job, promotions, etc.
5. For Grandchildren's milestones - i.e. First teeth, first day of school, solo in the talent show, etc.

As for the user experience, Mom opines, "It was easy to navigate, although I think they could put a bit more content examples - more diverse. The ones listed are all young kids and their activities. It needs to look more rounded for every age group to use. Also, I think that giving some examples after each bullet on the Home Page would be helpful."

Sounds like Mom would use the app as a lightweight, quick and topical "wall-blog" where an entry may or may not contain photos, commentary, links etc. - more geared towards on-the-fly content creation.

For me, I like the idea of sharing "family personal" (as opposed to personal personal) holiday photos so I don't have to clog up my beloved Flickr photostream and/or burn/mail CDs or explain ftp download (really ti's easy). I also like the idea of using Kids to distribute event photos to the vast collection of cousins I've yet to meet by setting a schedule.

With granular control of privacy, creative collection management and intuitive interface - These are my Kids is definitely worth checking into as a primary of complimentary tool for spreading family fun-times.