FamilyLeaf is an attempt to provide a private social network to members of the same family or to communities of close friends and acquaintances, small in number.

There have been in the past attempts to create similar sites, such as MyFamily.com, Famento.com or FamilyCrossings.com, but FamilyLeaf makes things very easy to get started and it’s completely free to use, at least for now. The webapp currently displays an invite signup screen, as it wants to prevent growing too fast too soon, but it’s expected to be able to obtain an account relatively fast.

FamilyLeaf was founded by Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta, two childhood friends. Compared to other early-stage startups, they took the effort to make the site as friendly as possible to foreign traffic. There are already localized versions in Italian, French or Spanish.

The site is backed by Y! Combinator and has been featured in the media in extensive reviews, such as this one (which appeared in TechCrunch). During their initial launch month, FamilyLeaf had 2’000 unique monthly visitors.