Thank you to everyone for using and providing feedback on the Tpstry site. We’ve taken that feedback and made the site even better!
Today we are launching a site redesign. This redesign is intended to make Tpstry easier to use and to also introduce the Family Memories website section of Tpstry.
Making Tpstry Easier
Answering questions is how Tpstry collects your family memories, so we reconfigured the visual design of the site to better reflect this idea. We also made it easier to find an existing entry by adding a “Quick Nav” search box that will take you directly to the page for a particular entry.
Family Memories Website
Now that you have answered questions and uploaded images, wouldn’t it be great to view all this in a visually appealing website? Well now you can. Once you log into your Tpstry family, click on the “View Website” button in the top left of the page. This will take you to your Family Memories website. This website is a read-only version of all the answered questions and uploaded images. We plan on adding a lot more features to the Family Memories website in the future to let you customize your site and easily share it with others.
We hope you and your loved ones will have an enjoyable holiday season. This is also a great time to share Tpstry with your family. At family gatherings you can ask relatives to help answer questions and also invite them to join your Tpstry family.
Here are some other ideas on how to add to your Tpstry family over the holidays.
Add Family Gatherings as Events
If your family gathers together for a meal or party, you can add that as an Event. For an event, you can answer where the event occurred and who attended it. By answering when an event occurred, it will appear on your timeline.
Upload Pictures of Christmas Morning
If you have kids, then you probably take pictures of them opening presents. You can upload these to Tpstry and mark when, where and who is in the picture. Just like an event, if you answer when the picture was taken, it will also appear on your timeline.
Remember Past Holidays
Maybe you and your relatives want to answer questions about past holidays. You can answer questions like: What is this person’s favorite holiday food? Was this person scared to get their picture taken with Santa Claus? What is this person’s favorite Christmas ornament?
We thank you for joining us in 2010 and we can’t wait until next year. We have lots of plans to make Tpstry even better. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/tpstryweb) , on Facebook (http://facebook.com/tpstry) and on your support website (http://support.tpstry.com).
Privacy is a major concern for most people who use Tpstry, so we made it one of our major concerns too.
When you create a family and start answering questions, those answers are private. Only other users who you invite to join your family can see those answers. When you invite a new person to your family, you are giving that person the ability to read the existing family history, answer questions and ask new custom questions.
Search engines like Google cannot access your information so the general internet population will not be able to see your answers.
We will have additional security and privacy features available to our premium accounts when we launch those in a few months.
We’ve heard often from users that they wished it was quicker and easier to invite relatives to join your Tpstry family. We looked at a few different solutions and came up with one that we think will work nicely.
When you answer a question where the answer is a person (like who is your father or mother), you are now given the option to enter that person’s email address. By doing this, an invitation will automatically be sent to their email address with all the information they need to join your family.
As we, the Tpstry founders, got older, we began to realize that we wanted to know more about many of our relatives who had already passed away. We wanted to know what they were like as kids, who were there favorite entertainers, what jobs had they worked at. Unfortunately we couldn’t talk directly to them, but we could talk to our other living relatives who knew them. By using the combined knowledge of our living relatives, we could learn so much more about our deceased relatives. Since we had already missed our chance with our deceased relatives, we didn’t want to miss our chance with our living relatives. So we could ask them the same questions and learn even more about everone in our family.
Thus, Tpstry was born as a place to gather and organize not only our past family history, but also the new living history made everyday.
Just as history is living and changes everyday, so Tpstry will change to meet the needs of it’s users. Please feel free to join our Support Forums to tell us what you like and don’t like about Tpstry.
