FamiliLink Blog

By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and Co-founder FamiliLink

With families becoming smaller and living more dispersed finding easy ways to stay in touch becomes increasingly more important. Grandparents living far away from their grandchildren can feel lonely and disconnected from their loved ones. Today, caring family members are looking for solutions to easily connect and share their digital lives with their older loved ones. Remember the time when people use to print all their photos and make actual physical photo albums? Then it was easy to print “doubles” and have the extra photos dropped in the mail and sent to loved ones. Today, people’s lives are being captured digitally and online photo albums are becoming the “norm”. Digital photos and videos are easy and fun to share with more tech savvy family and friends, but this creates an even greater divide and disconnect with our older loved ones who are more technology challenged.

Families are trying a number of solutions to help their older loved ones stay connected, including digital picture frames and email…with little success. The frames require too much work to upload images at a special website. Older adults continue to struggle with email. (Studies show that seniors have twice as hard a time as their younger counterparts using the computer.) Research shows this to be a huge problem for millions of families. Of course there is always the phone and snail mail but everyone is becoming more and more digital. Fortunately seniors are increasingly going online and adopting email as a way to stay in touch with their loved ones. A recent article stated that in 2000, fewer than 20% of Americans older than 64 could access the Internet, but today 37% of Americans older than 64 are online. This is an 85% increase in just eight years. From the same article some other interesting facts:

• The top reason seniors want to go online is to connect with family and friends
• Most seniors like e-mail so they can stay in touch with children and grandchildren.
• Seniors said one of the values of being online is so they can see family photos.

Time to look into what the internet has to offer grandparents who want to stay in touch. Email is an obvious solution; others are webcam, instant messenger, Skype and online sharing sites like Kodakgallery, Flickr, Shutterfly and even Facebook. These are all valuable but have some disadvantages for both the tech savvy user and the more technology challenged grandparent. These disadvantages include:

• Skype, webcam needs some tech expertise from the grandparent to be able to use conveniently. And there is still a large group of seniors that do not like to talk to a computer at all, they prefer the phone.
• Photo sharing sites and social networks are hard to navigate for a less experienced senior because of the many links and small fonts. Even if the grandparent knows how to use a specific photo sharing sites he or she might end up having to go to 3 or 5 different sites to stay updated , as different grandchildren and children use different sites to post their content. As for social networks, seniors in general do not embrace the “group” concept and grandchildren are not always happy if grandma writes something on their wall.
• Photos that family members send as an email attachment are sometimes hard to open for a less computer experienced user and then get lost on the computer and cannot really be “enjoyed” later.

FamiliLink fulfills this need by aggregating family content for the grandparent at one place with a very simple to use interface. Grandchildren can send photos as an attachment to the grandparent’s FamiliLink email address and the photos will automatically display at their FamiliLink page. The grandparent can easily enlarge the photos received, forward them to others and view them as a slide show.

So far the ability to view photos and also videos at one place definitely has proven one of the killer apps for FamiliLink users together with just simply having all social content of people that matter most conveniently aggregated at one place. No need to follow complicated links or download attachments.

Tags: grandparents, senior friendliness, Seniors and internet, Seniors and loneliness

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.