Build a fancy looking family tree with Kindo

Kindo is a new genealogy site for users who want to create an online family tree. Like Geni and Amiglia, Kindo runs on Flash, and makes it dead simple to start building up your family tree with very little programming expertise whatsoever. You start with a mother, father, and child, and you can continue to work up and out, adding more people as you go along. To help aid in family tree creation, you can invite your family members to claim their profile, which will give them privileges to add and remove members from the tree.

Besides the very basic and simple implementation of the tree creation, there's also an integrated social network for families who want to dig a little deeper. Each family member gets their own profile, which shows off any included personal information, along with a list of updates they or others have made on the service. There's also a status update option a la Facebook and Twitter that lets you announce what you're doing to your family members. More helpful, however, is the birthday and anniversary reminder tool, which will automatically let you know when there's a family birthday coming up. While both these things can be had elsewhere, it's a nice touch.

One of the past criticisms we've had with sites like this is how they handle the non-nuclear families--single parents, adoptions, half siblings, and the like. The good news is that Kindo has planned ahead, and easily lets you add a half sibling, or a single parent to any part of the family lineage. There's still not a simple way to deal with adoptions, but you can add notes to someone's profile when you make it to denote that the mother and father they're tied to aren't the birth parents. You can even note if they're deceased.

I give this site the thumbs up for its simplicity. It took me less than 10 minutes to piece together my immediate family, and that of my uncle's. As long as you've got their pictures handy you can even give them thumbnail icons too. What would really take it to the next level is integration with Plaxo, so you could pick and choose from your e-mail contacts to populate the graph. The only thing I'm worried about is how they intend to make money, as there's no advertising or premium service. The only thing they've got going that I can foresee helping them make any cash are links to parnered sites like Moo, Amazon, Photobox, and Skype.Also worth checking out is Ancestry.com, which will do the hunting and data entry for you, as long as you're willing to part with a couple hundred bucks and some cheek cells.