The boss of FindMyPast and several other genealogy web sites has hit out at the “detritus of life” that people pour on to social networks like Facebook, as he pledged to turn his pioneering Friends Reunited website into a “memory box” alternative.
Chris van der Kuyl, chief executive of Brightsolid, the digital arm of media firm DC Thomson, which owns Friends Reunited and findmypast.com and censusrecords.com, said it is spending millions digitizing newspaper archives, birth, marriage and death records, and paperwork from former British colonies such as India, to help turn it into a repository of historical information. "The richness of the stories has blown us away. They are littered with eureka moments," he said.
Chris van der Kuyl, chief executive of Brightsolid, the digital arm of media firm DC Thomson, which owns Friends Reunited and findmypast.com and censusrecords.com, said it is spending millions digitizing newspaper archives, birth, marriage and death records, and paperwork from former British colonies such as India, to help turn it into a repository of historical information. "The richness of the stories has blown us away. They are littered with eureka moments," he said.
You can read more in an article by Katherine Rushton in The Telegraph at http://goo.gl/glDDm.
Comment: I have to say that I agree with Chris van der Kuyl about Facebook. I use it less and less because of all the garbage there and because of the many security and privacy issues that have surfaced since the site was started. It is great to see a CEO stand up and state that his company is striving to offer better quality to its customers. I doubt that any social networking company will ever be perfect, but when top management leads the way, any company can be better than what it has been.
