Pongyow makes it easy for families to put up videos and photos and share them with other families.

Last year I went to a cousin’s wedding and took pictures with my digital camera. When I got home I found all my aunts and uncles asking for the pictures to be put online. I didn’t want to just throw our personal pictures up on flickr or photobucket. Flickr seemed far too public and photobucket displayed the pictures far too impersonally. That’s why when I began talking to Josh Tyler of Pongyow at my recent excursion to a web 2.0 beta mixer, I really saw the value of the having a website which was family web media oriented.

Here’s my interview:

Pongyow looks fairly simple to some of us who have been blogging for awhile and have grown up with the internet but for our parents setting such a site up might be daunting. Looking at the example family site they had set up I was a little unsure if my mom would be able to manage such a task to get something like this set up:

Signup was quick and painless. An email and link later I was at my new family homepage

The site has placemarks for all the sort of stuff that mom would probably want to edit and to make the experience even easier mousing over on anything on the page brings up a helpful bubble explaining what it’s purpose is. The entire site has this hand holding feel to it. I can see my aunts figuring this site out fairly quickly. The biggest issue with photosharing sites on the web these days and the older generation is uploading photos. So I found it really reassuring when I saw Pongyow’s upload page which contained a number of flavors by which you could upload by.

The site has been very well thought out for it’s target population. After the interview Josh mentioned how when they started Pongyow they put up a standard site without that many features and as mom’s began using it and asking for features and changes they followed. It’s amazing and comforting to see a site which so fits its’ target audience. The features such as the help and the quick blocking tools and general layout are all the sort that I would see my family looking for. This is a site that has so much potential because it fits such a practical role in family life, and the website really shows thought, and the fact that it got a thumbs up from my mom when I showed it to her speaks bounds about the future success these guys will probably have.

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