Welcome to roundbook's Roundeo

1. Parental controls – We are building in the ability to be the designated owner of other accounts. The idea is that I want my children to have a place to share things with their friends online, but I don’t want them sharing their lives with just anyone. The owner (parent) invites and accepts invitations on behalf of the user (child).

2. Designated helper – The second part of this involves being a designated helper. Rather than owning the account administration, the helper can help manage another user’s account. The example here is that my mom isn’t too keen on how to invite family members, so I can invite on her behalf from my account, rather than logging in to her account.

Ease of Use in Making Connections

3. User connections / Profile sharing – We are working on AJAX enabled sections that allow for easier social connections. A user will be able to search through their family and friends’ networks to find other users to connect to. Users will be able to view each other’s public profile, and decide from there if they wish to invite that person to join them.

Safety

4. Report abuse – users will be able to report any type of abuse. We are making a safe and clean online environment for families.

Sharing

5. Guest passes – We are working on a guest pass that a user can issue to people who don’t have Roundbook.com accounts. Roundbook.com is built on private networks between users. Since it allows for posting pictures, blogs (stories), etc., it is encouraged to share with all of your family and friends. And here’s the example – we just took pictures of my son in his favorite Superman outfit. I’ve posted those pictures and comments on Roundbook.com. Everyone that is connected to me can see those pictures. I also want to show the pictures to my co-workers, but don’t really want them permanently connected to me on Roundbook.com. I issue them a guest pass so they can see my account. They don’t need to have a Roundbook.com account, and they don’t have to be connected to me to see my son’s Superman pictures.

Same basic look, easier to use, faster to find what you want.
One of the challenges we have in offering a family and friend networking site with so many features (and more planned to come) is integrating the many features with ease of use. We are always searching for new ways to make the site easier to use. Our “Do Something” panel is on every page and at one click, you can see everything that you can do on the site. But we wanted to provide a quick glance at the features within the navigation, plus tell what’s pertinent to the page you are on. As a result, we have introduced a new, not totally different, improved navigation bar that provides the following:

Identifies the logged in user: This provides the logged in user’s name, profile link, logout, and help link.

Search field: Users can search people, blogs, and pictures from any page using the search field in the top right corner.
Main menu navigation bar: The navigation bar is still there, and we’ve added an Invite button in clear view. The biggest improvement for the navigation bar is the rollover options, and that introduces the submenu.
Submenu: Just underneath the main menu navigation bar is the submenu. The submenu provides the options for the current page. When a user rolls over a main menu button, the submenu also reveals what is to be found on the corresponding page. For example, if you are on the Blog page, the submenu will show you that you can write a blog, view blogs, etc. If, while on the blog page you mouse over the Pictures button, the submenu will show you the options for the pictures page, such as add pictures, view pictures, add an album, etc.
Hope you like it!

We’ve been wanting to change the top navigation for some time now but hadn’t found the right way to do it. And the biggest concern was - what if we change it too much, what if people got used to the old way? That’s always the danger of changing something fundamental. If core pieces always change, then they throw off the user and the site becomes less usable. In the end we decided that this design accomplishes a lot, is expandable (who know’s what we’ll add next), and really isn’t that different from the old navigation.

So enjoy!

New features have been introduced to Roundbook.com as part of our ongoing improvements. These improvements are in direct relation with our post

In the Works at Roundbook.com

DO SOMETHING
Do something gives you one central place, on every page to… do something. It looks like this:

Just click on the DO SOMETHING link and an attractive list of everything you can do on Roundbook.com is displayed. We hope this makes using Roundbook.com easier for you.

Easier Connections
An important goal at Roundbook.com is to make it easy to connect to other users. We are continuing to innovate in this area. The recently added people tree allows you to easily see who you are connected to, and to easily see who other people are connected to.

The people tree shows each of your groups. Click on the plus and you see who is your groups. Click on the plus for a person in your group, and you see their profile picture and have links of ways to interact with those people.

If you are on someone elses site or profile, you will be able to see their groups and the people they have in each of their groups. If you are not connected to one of those people, and want to be - then click on the Invite link and you’ll have the chance to invite them.

We are still adding improvements to this area, but hope that this start will make it easier for you to connect to all of your family and friends.

Plus, if you want to look for people, don’t forget to use the Search toolbar in the upper right hand side of the site. You can search for all people on Roundbook.com with public profiles, blogs, and pictures using the search feature.

Recently there has been an outburst of web activity, labeled Family 2.0.

CNET covered it with

Here come the ‘Family 2.0′ sites

All of this has been very interesting to me since I’ve developed a family and friend networking web application called Roundbook.com (http://www.roundbook.com).

I’ve labeled it as Family and Friends 2.0, since it allows private (safe) networking with both family and friends and takes advantage of blogs, pictures, interests, calendars, etc. It is in Beta form right now and available to the public. As with others like it in Beta form - more features are planned.

I plan on using this blog to track my progress of the development. I’m quite excited about how it will all work as I put it together.