Managing a family in the world of Web 2.0 can be complicated with parents and children using a variety of work, school and personal email accounts and calendars, but a new site launched yesterday called Home Tribes helps you organize all of your family schedule in one place.

Home Tribes provides weekly digests -- daily if you upgrade to a premium account -- of the agenda for the week or day to eliminate any "surprises" throughout the week -- like say soccer practice is cancelled and you need to pick up your kids from school at three instead of five.

"The inspiration for Home Tribes came from my personal needs," Vincent Lamanna, Quebec-based programmer and engineer who founded the site tells LAUNCH via email. "I am pretty busy at work, like most of us are nowadays, and I have to take care of my family. I felt I was lacking a tool to communicate with my wife about appointments, events and other important stuff I had to do. That's how Home Tribes was born."

The Home Tribes dashboard gives users a quick overview into what events are coming up as well as notes posted by other members of your tribe.

Each member can add to the shared tribe calendar when new appointments come up, or if say you needed someone to make a stop at the grocery store on their way home, you could share a list of groceries.

Users can leave "Important notes" for their tribe, which will alert other members via email of the addition. Regular notes will just be populated on the dashboard and require users log in to see the notes.

While Home Tribes doesn't necessarily beat the usability of a Google calendar, it does make it easy for families or groups to share information if they use different accounts and keep everyone updated at once without having to individually copy each member on an email.

"I think people would want to use Home Tribes over Google Calendar or age-old paper calendar and notes because it allows them to easily get access to all the information from anywhere," Vincent says. "Everyone has its own login credentials but when they get into the account everything is shared. The same thing would be achievable through Google Calendar but setting everything up requires some technical knowledge."

Home Tribes is free for up to two accounts, but if you're family or group is larger than two people, the premium account will run you $4.95/month, but that allows for unlimited members and will give you access to the daily email blasts and real time alerts.

Lumanna is also the founder of ORGAnimal, which is an online based pet manager to keep track of appointments at the vet and your animals needs from the pet shop.

SCREENSHOTS

The Tribe's Dashboard provides a breakdown of all of the important information a person needs. From upcoming events and newly added appointments, as well as important and new notes.

Members can name their tribe and include information about their. You can add new members to your tribe by entering their name and email address and then assigning them a color for their updates.

Members can add notes to the Tribe dashboard, but if they have something important they need to share if they mark it as important, each member of the tribe will receive an email alert.

LAUNCH Blog