Much has already been said about the online family tree applications on the Web, that allows you to build your real-life family network into a genealogy in order to preserve your family history. I recently came across Hellotree! A Canadian startup that focused on family network as its main growth driver. Upon you sign-up for the site, you can start to email your family members to join this Hellotree! and begin to grow your own family network.

When you do this, you’ll notice that your own family network is growing from your near relatives with whom you share with a common ancestor. In other words, it is like a family-type of social network, and a diagram offered by Hellotree! will underline the existing of one’s family genetic link. On the site, users are allowed to build their profiles, share family photos, and choose the privacy level of their profiles if they want to.

However, while few startups in this field such as this Hellotree!, MyHeritage and Geni are already focusing on the evolution of this family social network, they all have yet to achieve differentiate strategy and thus risk missing a significant differentiation advantage.

Are you someone:

Tired of having 50, 100 or 200 “Twitter Following?”

Want to interact with other like-minded people on Twitter and looking for an awesome Twitter recommendation engine?

Or is your Twitter tweets starved? And you don’t know whom to follow in order to receive new tweets?

And you’re ready to find out how you can supercharge your Twitter account with a few clicks and a few Twitter heroes…

If any of the above sounds interesting, you should take a look at a new Twitter third-party application called Twannabe, that was being built by a Twitter API. Go to the site, and simply log on to your Twitter account, and type anyone of the Twitter users that you admired, they named him/her as “Your Twitter hero,” this Twannabe will instantly generate a list of Twitter users (not more than 2,000) that your hero followed and you might interested to do so.

blummi! is a new Twitter third-party application that is being introduced on the Web recently. It harnesses the micro blogging innovation that brought by Twitter and want to bring it to the next level, i.e. social network that based on the tweets. I guess when potential users visit their landing page, they’ll be surprised by what they see after they arrive that blummi! also include the native support of microformat.

What you need to know about blummi! is that it is a Web service which combined features of Twitter and social network. You can track your friends here, probably through the mobile support provided by blummi!, discover new places, share the favorite places by reviewing it with a maximum 140-character, meet new friends, and if you find a friend that share the common interest as you, you can make friend with her/him on blummi!

Currently, blummi! is available in the private beta phase, thus the inquisitive may need to request a beta access to it. In overall, blummi! still very new, not much users right now, that’s why we won’t see any testimonials from the satisfied users in the blogosphere.

For the readers that followed closely on TagEdge, you all know that I often profile on Israeli startups, and used to think that Israeli startups as not merely the creative technology firms, but also firms that will change the world eventually. A new social search engine called Delver is the one that I like indeed, my first impression was…eh, which was a too cold cool social search engine that not to sign-up and try.

Delver is currently in Alpha phase. If it is barely a search engine, or meta search, that’s not much I can talk about. However, it applied a new technology called social search which offer a way for users to bookmark, or Web, people, media search based on their social graph. If you don’t have any profiles in any social network, you won’t notice this wonderful feature. But if you register and link all your profiles, range from MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, to Facebook, you’ll realize the powerful search engine rendered by Delver.

From the profile linking, you can add your own search buddies, that enables you to give priority to results created or referenced by these people. Furthermore, you also can add social circles, which offer a way connect you with people that have something in common with you. Delver will take into consideration on who your friends are and it will return your search queries based the contents that your friends made on Delver as well as what bookmarks they’ve done in the past on Delver. Put simply, Delver can deliver a totally different search results based on your trusted friends you followed on Delver and indexed what they’ve done and their ultimate goal is to recommend your friends’ search results to you completely.

I’d like to share what I thought Delver is good in the practice that it allowed one to easily bookmark certain results with a single click namely “keep it,” the search result you like will instantly save to the right-hand sidebar for your future references. Also, I want to note here after played around it for a while, I knew that its ranking methodology is based on your own social connections, your friends’ quality contents will always be ranked higher than the other search results that based on the keywords you input into the Delver search bar.

In overall, I still feel Delver is very cool, but I’ll give it a second look, when it ready for the beta launch in the near future.

atomkeep is a new Web application that tend to fulfill users’ demand of sync (synchronize) their multiple social networking profiles. If you’ve more than five (5) social network accounts, the features of atomkeep surely will interested you. To start sync your multiple social network profiles into one that to be appeared on atomkeep, you simply required to register with the site, and atomkeep is free and public available at this moment.

Currently, atomkeep rolled out support for LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster, Flickr, etc. altogether fifteen (15) social networking sites, at the time of my writing. You can start sync your accounts simply by link and add all of your social network profiles to atomkeep, and atomkeep will thus help you to import all the data from these accounts to the one you opened on atomkeep. In the process of synchronization, it is mighty hard to ignore the beauty of flexibility, users on atomkeep will always have the choices of adding additional data that they feel is necessary to be added into their profiles.

Like other social network profiles, atomkeep profile comprised of the column of your personal data, such as Name & Location, Contact, Relationships, Political & Religious Views, Education and Work background, Professional Summary, Career Info as well as Resume. Also, you can edit the data through the editor available, and you’re given options to either hide or make your profile publicize in the eyes of your prospective employers, etc. Once you finished filling up all the necessary fields found in each columns, you can start sync it back with all of the target social networks with a single click.

Apparently, with the help of this atomkeep, you’ll realize you’ll have the only one type of data that to be represented your own inner self, your identity eventually. If you found that there’s a big disparity on some data, put an example, “Summarize your professional experience and goals,” underneath the Professional Summary column, don’t be surprised. A lot of people still don’t know what they’re doing, and where they want to go from here, this might include me or you, sad to say this.

Profilactic is a social media aggregator that launched in the end of 2006. It is focus primarily in pulling all of your online profiles into one place. In other word, if you’ve Twitter, blog(s), Flickr, YouTube, etc., what you need to do is sign-up to Profilactic and then start to pull all of these activities under the accounts aforesaid into your Profilactic. On the other hand, you also can see everything that going on with your friends in all the sites they used, provided they’ve a Profilactic account. You can imagine it is very cool when you can interact with multiple sites at once. This type of aggregator or better known as lifestream mashup is pervasive now on the Web. In using this type of service, you also can create a badge, i.e. My lifestream and put it onto your blog, or some other social networking sites.

Social media aggregator is not a very special asset that can earn a startup supercompetitive for an unusually long time. FriendFeed also doing it, with the intense competition from Socialthing!, iminta, and Plaxo. However, Profilactic is trying to outstrip its competitors in a “number game.” They made a comparison with FriendFeed in March this year, in a post entitled, “Profilactic vs. FriendFeed,” with the statement that Profilactic is supporting 155 social sites. Now the number has increased to 186.

Hainei, another Facebook clone in China has a new feature this week. That new feature is the highly configurable poll system that give its users to post their questions and receive feedback from other Hainei users. Look at the picture I enclosed in the below, you’ll learn from other users on “what is the best programming language to develop a Web app?” and the answer from the Hainei community is PHP. Aha, I wonder it is the correct answer.

Hainei is a Facebook clone that was launched in end of 2007. Ironically, it was the second social networking project by Mr. Wang Xing, the founder of Xiaonei. Hainei was launched based on a careful review that China or Chinese users need another social networking platform, other than Xiaonei that was mainly targeting at the students, whereas Hainei is a social networking platform for the adults. Although the design of Hainei is different from Xiaonei, the features or functionality from sign-up till enter the user profile is similarly the same, besides this poll system.

Do Chinese users need another social networking platform other than Xiaonei or Facebook? I will become convince that the answer is yes if Hainei really execute the repositioning of brand and attract more Chinese users other than solely from China. I’ve a lot of close friends that did not join Facebook, they perceived Facebook as something to do with a community whereby users need to have a degree from some Ivy-League schools, or well-speaking English; and majority of Facebook’s Chinese users are those who are banana Chinese (who know speak and read English very well, but don’t know Mandarin at all and they keep on shouting to a lot of people that they love Facebook!). On the other hand, Xiaonei is purely occupied by China students. It failed to position as a platform for all the Chinese users to get along with and happily interact with each other there.

At this moment, I do not know what is the future plan of Hainei on how it targeting the Chinese working adults. But reading some of the open polls is really a funny thing to do. All the polls are restricted to registered Hainei users, and you can also read the detailed statistics, results display before the voting. By the way, those who create the open poll can set the expiry date of the poll.

The other day I talked about Xiaonei, a successful Facebook clone in China. It seemed that social network and the clone Facebook UI (User Interface) still a great deal in China, as the China IM (instant messenger) giant, QQ has launched its social networking service, a Facebook clone to its IM users few days ago.

This QQ social network is called QQ Xiaoyou, in Chinese mean “QQ校友,” i.e. QQ alumni. It is currently in private beta phase, and will be launched to the selected QQ IM users. In fact, QQ is claimed as the number one IM provider in China, combining a critical mass of its IM users: active users 220 million out of registered users 570 million, and the messages sending approx. 1 billion per day, QQ has built an unique stronghold in IM services in China. In China, every startups want to emulate the success of QQ or Baidu, but most of these startups are late starters in the race to build such a huge user base.

On QQ Xiaoyou’s landing page, you’ll notice it look exactly like Facebook, but QQ Xiaoyou use green color instead of blue to make it clear that they’re not another Facebook. Nevertheless, this move is its second attempt to break into the University or college students’ community, as QQ has launched its first social networking community called “QQ Campus” in July 2007, but eventually have neither profits nor much in the way of market share to show for it.

For private beta users to register their accounts at QQ Xiaoyou, they need to use their real names, not their IM usernames as usual. To verify their users, QQ Xiaoyou is taking 3 to 5 days for each registered users in order to inhibit the fake accounts fraud, as shown in the picture below.