Thanks to a Google ad on my site I was surprised to realize that one of the popular genealogical social networking sites, MyHeritage has launched their Hungarian language site, MyHeritage.hu. Looks like every bit of the interface has been translated to Hungarian. MyHeritage has been available in more than a dozen languages, and now, besides Hungarian, they offer the service in Ukrainian, Czech and Polish, too.

It was only a couple of months ago that Őseim.hu (MyAncestors.hu), an online Hungarian genealogy application started and it was only a couple of weeks ago that Családfalu, a genealogy and social networking service, came out with their beta. Családfalu is operated by Budapest-based professional genealogist, Péter Bárdossy.

Unfortunately none of these two Hungarian sites has proven to be an instant hit. Those Hungarians with experience in genealogy research (e. g. this post on the Csaladtortenet mailing list) haven't been bitten by the social networking bug enough and for those web savvies pampered with feature rich English language sites getting their feet wet in genealogy these two Hungarian sites were not juicy enough. At least this is the bottom line of the comments posted on the dot hu web2.0 cheerleader blog, Webisztán.

Is this the momentum for MyHeritage and similar sites? Paul Allen and others are enthusiastic. Here in Hungary there seems to be a burnout of iWiW users. iWiW is the Hungarian Facebook, an almost monopoly in social networking. Having collected all the possible friends and family users now start to wonder what the further real use of this site would be. Niche social networking activities might be the way go, including, of course, family (history). (Paul Allen's post about MyFamily's lost opportunity.)

The great thing about MyHeritage is the multilingual feature of their site. Thinking of all those gazillions of families with roots in Hungary now spread all over the world, this service has the potential of becoming a success.

Could MyHeritage and the Hungarian sites leave RadixForum in the dust? I don't know. With all the VC coming to MyHeritage, a brute force campaign on their side might be a real bash.