My Heritage: Not only identify clones

Start - up My Heritage Although Israel became famous thanks to his clones identification feature, but he wants to be the Facebook of families
"Week clones" that occurred this month may irritate those who shared his action and managed to escape from social networks - but did much better one Israeli company. "My Heritage" (MyHeritage) was the main beneficiary of the other surfers search celebrities like them, because it provides such a comparison service. The company's mobile app was a significant jump table free applications are downloaded the most during the week. Even now, after the madness subsided, she stays in fourth place in Google's rankings Fly, Android application store.
But rather to identify clones is only a relatively minor feature the company's product portfolio, with offices located in Or Yehuda. May's main service is a kind of Heritage social network for families, allowing users to explore family roots. This service users can build their family tree and share it with their relatives, as well as photographs and family stories. In addition, the service performs mutual information matches the social network for complete details, especially in the detection of lost family members. These adjustments are made on the basis of names, dates, places, and events.
Except in conjunction with other family trees, what the company calls "Smart matches", crossing service from family trees on the site and 4 billion historical documents uploaded to the recent past, which includes an extensive collection of newspaper articles - the world's largest, according to the company's founder and its CEO Gilad Japheth. database, which includes over a billion articles from the 18th century to the present, collected articles to local newspapers, mainly in the United States and England. articles are scanned in their entirety and are then analyzed, and the information which the attachment site users and their own family trees, and allows them to keep track of citations to their won relatives in the press. longer service includes a large database of images of tombstones, as well as birth and death certificates.

Were multiplied in the case

"There is no invasion of privacy." Matching clones of the May Heritage (screenshot)
Feature matching celebs born following facial recognition feature development of the company. Japheth describes the process as a mistake - "like the invention of penicillin." He said the company collected multiple samples of pictures celebrities to train and improve the algorithms for face detection, and dropped huge amounts of pictures image search engine Google. Then erroneously identified a picture of Japheth the - by the service picture of American tennis player John McEnroe. The software does not determine that there similarities between them, but the CEO is actually a well-known tennis player. "Looked at the picture and I saw many similarities between me and McEnroe in this picture, then I thought it would be cool if users could upload their photos and see which celebrities are the same," he says .
Clones is the first feature that was available on the site with the rise into the air. From 2005 to 2007 he enjoyed great popularity, but only in 2010 realized its full potential - as a surfer initiated the tradition of the "Week clones" online, which led to the overthrow 250 servers now within hours. At first thought in the May Heritage that an attack on its servers, but testing showed that the movement does not come from a specific, but all over the United States. Accelerated interest in the feature also restored the next two years, but it seems that only in February this year also the dam was breached Israel. According to the company, nearly 400 thousand Israelis lowered its mobile app (iPhone and Android) - "5% of Israel's residents," boasts beautiful.
"We are very careful about privacy," he says. "We decided not to allow our system to look at the faces and learn them and then find pictures of other people with the same face." "The world is not ready for that in terms of privacy, and we do not offer this feature. Now when you compare yourself to a celebrity it is clear that there is no violation of privacy - you upload your image, we compare it to celebrities and then delete it., But our system also learns to recognize faces - If you are uploading pictures of your family, she will know automatically who it is, but try to identify people outside your family. "

Social network in which it's okay to be a member of Mom

Service of the May Heritage now 72 million registered users, built 27 million family trees and a billion and a half profiles. Into the family trees were hundreds of millions of images "raise different than people up - more historical photos and have a very high life," according to Japheth. "You can take Facebook for you where or picture pub. These must be photos ashamed of them a year - two years, and in five years you do not want them at all. Photographs people bring us are the images they want to perpetuate - Birthday family photo with his grandfather, photos as time passes people become even more nostalgic for them. "
The service is operated in 40 languages, to produce a global foothold. "Families are scattered all over the world, and almost no Israeli who has no relatives abroad," says Japheth. "And a child at the age of 13 who does root work - if he does not know English well, you have to give him tools in Hebrew."
- And yet, Why choose you? Facebook users already are and they do not like to hold a lot of profiles.
"We do very different from Facebook. Facebook you keep in touch often with friends, and you do not want to name your mother. You do not want her to see what you are doing. We are, however, a service you do not want it to your friends - You want it your mother and your grandmother, and you keep him in touch with your entire extended family. We have profiles also of people die, and Facebook does not. importance of dead people is that they connect life. I mean, if you and I are close family, apparently it through a deceased person. "
"Facebook does not know which of your social connections - you can tell that someone is your brother, but she did not know if it's your brother through the father or by the mother, maybe your half-brother. We know to set the exact family ties - in fact we map the genealogy of mankind. All our genealogy together and we can say about how any two people on Earth are close, and what is coming. we can actually draw the connection. all that you can not do on Facebook. we think there is room for at least three social networking : Facebook friends, LinkedIn for business, and mei Heritage 'families. We want to make the company become the third - the third largest social network, dealing with families. "