I have an idea for a website/web application that has a lot of potential. Here is the basic idea:

This is going to be a site for organizing family trees, family information and individual personal information. It will work like a sort of combination between Wikipedia and Myspace.

Individuals will be able to add people and create profiles and information about that individual. They will be able to upload pictures of themselves, information about their jobs, lives, projects and probably most importantly family members and their relationship to those family members. You can literally write anything at all. And all of this information will be stored in a database like forum software. The site will be database driven and database rendered. I'm probably going to implement it with ASP.NET and I'll use MySQL and PHPMyAdmin for database management software.

So I'm going to start the populating the database with myself. I'll have a picture, my interests, my job, contact information and the people in my immediate family. I'll be able to put any information I want on there. Then I'll have my brothers and parents do the same. We will establish explicitly to the program our relationships to one another. And then I'm going to do this with my uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents and they will do the same exact thing. They will do the same thing. People will scan photos of deceased relatives. The dead will be searchable.

The program will enable users to view the data in terms of family trees. It will let the user search for individuals and names. People will be able to edit data like Wikipedia. Best of all, it will be a web application so everybody will be able to access it. There will be no need for product distribution. There is a real possibility of it spreading like wildfire as people become interested in learning about family members and family ties they never knew they had.

What do you think of my idea?
It's going to be quite a programming challenge, but I have some tech-savvy people in the family. I'm pretty good too. This should be interesting, to say the least. I wonder how much software I will be able to rip off from other people. I wonder how much original programming I will need to do. Well, give it to me. Is this a cool idea or what.

It can be not only a programming challange, but also a legal/privacy nightmare.
It is very private information you want to work with.

How so? People will only put on information that they want to--like Myspace. Nobody has to participate if they don't want to.

What if somebody adds people without their consent?

It can be a system sort of like Wikipedia. I haven't worked out the specifics. You can't change and edit all things in Wikipedia.

You're right though. That's definitely a concern. However, there would be pressure for differences to be settled amicably--seeing as how we're all family!

a wiki family tree would be pretty cool, but adding personal info(other than name and relationship) and profiles would undoubtedly turn it into some sort of faggy online social project like myspace as well as invading privacy.

Well, the only way it would be like myspace is that people would have profiles in which they could put anything they want in it. There would be no message system integrated in the program, like there is for Myspace. It would just be a way to look at and map relationships among the extended family. Of course, you could always email a family member if that person puts their email in their personal profile, but that would be from outside of the system.

In other words, the only way that it will be like myspace is because of the individual profiles. Although it will undoubtedly be an online social project, it won't be like Myspace, where everybody is in a flurry to make friends. In my program, there will be no friends--only family. It will be a research tool to find and learn about connections with people you didn't know you had--not a messaging system....

HOWEVER, I have considered attaching a forum to the site, where people can do the communication/myspace social thing if they choose to. I'm probably going to do that, but my first priority would be getting the main web application to work.

All in all it's a very interesting idea, francois. Good luck with it!

You tube was my idea, but i thought about it for years and look what happened.

On facebook I am part of a group of people with my same last name.

this project sounds a lot like facebook, except with the free-to-edit nature of wikipedia.

Do I really want people editing my profile?

this project sounds a lot like facebook, except with the free-to-edit nature of wikipedia.

Do I really want people editing my profile?
I don't think people would edit your profile. For some reason, I just don't think it would be a huge concern. It's not like this site is going to attract a lot of interest among hijackers. If somebody changes it, you can change it back. But I really don't think it will be an issue.