Why did we start Threemany?
People ask us that a lot — There is no secret here. We did not sit in a room and come up with this answer — we started Threemany to solve a problem that we all faced. The founders and the crew here have friends and family around the country as well as in different parts of the world. Given our busy lives with kids and work et al, and the timezone differences — it is very hard for us to keep in touch with email and phones and all and especially difficult for our kids to stay in touch with their cousins our friend’s kids .. you get the picture..
What can we do to help us help ourselves we said a few months ago ? That was the start of the design process to build ThreeMany. We had three main ideas when we decided to create the site
Keep it very simple - our family was not going to spend time understanding the intricacies of the web so we designed an easy to use page or a wall — just like a poster board where you can “post things”
Keep it private — we were concerned about making sure that only the folks who we cared about, saw the things we posted and no one else.
Make Video messags easy — ” We wanted to make it so easy that grandparents, kids (under strict supervision offcourse) could record and post a video message — no uploads, no waiting (cater to their impatience ;-)) — easy to record easy to play.
and that is it ….we started of with video messages and invited our family and close friends.. and they liked it — we were told by a few that, when they did not have their webcams, they wanted to leave a text post and hence stickies came along.. people started making their wall the place for them and their close ones to hang out — a few videos, some stickies and photos.. and here we are a few months later — easy to use site with a digital wall where you can visually interact with your close friends and family
Seems like I’m the first (other than your blog) to blog about your service. There are a few other sites like this, like voxlite and damaka, but I especially like that threemany requires no download or install to use. Now, like I mentioned in the post, let’s have user-level controls for the videos.
When will this service move out of beta?
Comment by planner — October 11, 2007 @ 8:02 am
Thank you for your feedback and appreciate you mentioning us on your blog. We just launched our public preview this morning and you indeed are our first blogger.
User controls that you mentioned are in our to-do list and we will get to them.
As far as when we will move out of the preview phase, we’ve been in the industry too long since our days at Oracle and Netscape in the 90s to set a date right now. We want feedback just like you gave us from users on how they are using our site.. the advantages that they and their families have in a site that is easy to use and gives them the privacy they need. We want to hear how they are using the wall ..and then we can decide the right time.
Thank you again for taking the time to talk about us gadgetsandsuch.com
Comment by threemany — October 11, 2007 @ 10:56 am
ThreeMany - personal message sharing portal uses OpenLaszlo
It doesn’t happen too often that people inform me of OpenLaszlo applications they have been building. But this week I got a nice mail from Srini, who’s working for Media Lasso. Here’s what Srini wrote me:
We at threemany.com have be…
Trackback by OpenLaszlo Project Blog — October 16, 2007 @ 7:24 pm
Very nice web2.0 tool. Finally once can now communicate with friends and family and not be a rocket scientist to do so…..
Comment by tofu — October 18, 2007 @ 12:07 pm
I love your site and I am really interested in getting some experience coding. I was wondering what IDE do you use?
Comment by Sean — October 28, 2007 @ 12:06 am
Hi, ThreeMany!
What a great service - thank you!
I found you via the OpenLaszlo blog (though we’re not programmers - yet), and our family will be checking this out over the coming year.
Comment by Andy — January 16, 2008 @ 7:38 am