I know a lot of families with very complex schedules. It can be hard to keep up. But there’s a new service called Famundo that is trying to make things a little simpler.

The advantage that Famundo has is that if your family uses it as a planner, you can subscribe to activities listed by organizations that also use the service, and have their schedule added to your planner automatically. You just choose the appropriate events.

The basic service is free. You get a family homepage, calendar and address book. Each family member can have their own log on, so what they see will be what they have selected as relevant to them.

Of course, you decide what is public and what is private. But they also allow parents to see what their children have declared private, so you don’t have to wonder what your child is adding to his or her own calendar.

I can see this being useful both to families that are longer distances apart as well as those that still have young children at home. Kids always have activities, but it can be nice for the grown children who have moved away or gone to college to be able to keep up with things they might want to visit home for.

I’m thinking about that in terms of my own extended family, in fact. My uncle always hosts a family dinner a couple weeks before Thanksgiving. That one is pretty easy to predict, but it nonetheless sometimes gets in the way of other things I’d like to do. And there’s been a lot going on for the family as a whole lately, so it would be very nice to have another way to let everyone know what’s going on.