When we covered the slate of companies helping people chronicle family stories and milestones, we left out a quiet but excellent Redmond, Washington startup called Sampa.

They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.

In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.

But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.

And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site - both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.

The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.

It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital - the company has raised just $310,000.

Sampa

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