This afternoon, I invited 200 friends, family, and ac­quain­tances to the Reilly & Bartholomew Family Journal. The Journal is the feature that we’ve been working on at Cozi for several months. It’s a light­weight blog that’s really easy to set up and post to, with straight­for­ward privacy controls.

More im­por­tant­ly, though, I invited those people to use Cozi for themselves.

I’m inviting you to read the Family Journal that Emma and I set up at Cozi. It’s a way of letting our friends and relatives keep up with us. If you see a story you like, add a smile. We hope you enjoy it!

I’m also inviting you to start using Cozi for yourselves.

Cozi is the Seattle startup where I’ve worked for the last two years as a developer. Our motto is "Family Life. Simplified." We provide a set of free tools that help busy families reduce the friction in their lives.

We have a shared Calender, color-coded for each member of the family. Keep track of your ap­point­ments and the kids’ ap­point­ments; have an automatic reminder sent to you by email or as a text message; import shared calendars from other sites, including your kids’ schools; syn­chro­nize the calendar with Microsoft Outlook; print out a month’s ap­point­ments; and more.

Keep track of your Shopping Lists and To-do Lists. Get the lists sent to your phone as a text or read out aloud to you. Access the shopping lists and calendar from the browser in your mobile phone.

The Journal is an easy place to jot down memories with photos. You can keep those memories private, you can send particular stories to friends, or you can share the journal with all your friends.

See http://www.cozi.com/Why-Use-Cozi.htm to get started.

One favor, please. Even if Cozi’s not right for you, please mention us to your friends. We may be right for them.

(Some of these features only work in the U.S. Sorry. We’re small, we have to con­cen­trate on our primary market.)

Thanks, /George Reilly

PS. To those of you I haven’t been in touch with for a while, get in touch.

Oddly, this is the first such mail that I’ve sent to more than a small number of people in my two years at Cozi. At first, it was because I didn’t think that Cozi was really ready to tout widely. Then I let it slide.

We released a monthly newsletter feature today, which sent out an email of all the August stories from shared journals. This was a good op­por­tu­ni­ty to tell everyone. The product is polished and genuinely useful.

Not much feedback so far.