I was asked by my friend Cindy if I’d like to take a look at a new website called Lifeables.com. This is a site that can collect photos and other bits of web content about your family to display to other friends and family. The main thing that I learned about this service is that you can share twitter and Facebook info with those family members who are not on Facebook and Twitter and it gets organized in a very cool way. I set up Lifeables to pull in photos of Eva or Andrew from my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds. The setup was very easy and the service looked back over the past three years for photos and quotes that I posted of Eva and Andrew. I’d like to see collection automation from YouTube as well because I do have some fun videos of the kids there.

In my family I am online all the time and very connected. My parents and in-laws are not as connected and so they do not see everything that I post about the kids. Lifeables makes it easy for them to see what the kids are up to and they also have the ability to upload photos from their own computers into the Lifeables pages for Eva and Andrew. You can make this site limited only to the family or make it public to the world. Personally I made this only available to my family. I then invited immediate family members so that they could also contribute. With everyone working together we can get a very complete picture of kids as they grow up. I like this because everyone working together makes for a much more comprehensive profile. There are photos on my Mom’s camera that haven’t even see her computer let alone the light of day. With Lifeables she can release those photos out for the rest of the family to see.

As you set up profiles for your family you can also give them family relationships. So for example my Dad can be shown to be the Grandfather of the kids, my sisters as Aunts and so forth. I would have liked the option to write a personal note about what Lifeables was all about when I sent the invite e-mail. Then I could explain to everyone what I was doing. But, the service is still very new so the are listening to the audience and coming up with new ideas and options for people. In the future Lifeables is going to offer printing of the collected Lifeables entries to make keepsake books and more.

A unique issue that I have had with the service is that because my name and Andrew’s is the same the automatic collection of images from my social media outlets has incorrectly tags images as Andrew when they are really of Eva. This is because the byline of my blog has my name and Lifeables thinks that Andrew (me) is my son Andrew (BugBug). This isn’t too huge an issue because you can easily edit each image to attach it to the correct child.

The Service is a free one and it is worth taking a look at especially if you have family who are resistant to Facebook and Twitter. You don’t have to leave them behind in the progress of your children’s lives. At least that part of their lives that you brag about and share online.

You can find Lifeables at http://www.lifeables.com or on twitter at @lifeables or even on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Lifeables. There are even more features to this service. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface and I’ve been using it heavily for a little while now already.

Disclosure: I received a small gift card for checking out the Lifeables service. Opinions about it and what it does are 100% my own.