Having successfully avoided what some young actors fall prey to -- the alcohol-and-drug fueled parties, petty crime and in some cases death or suicide -- actor Barry Williams was content to move on from the TV sitcom world when The Brady Bunch (on which he played Greg Brady) stopped production in 1974. He did some musical theatre, got some walk-on roles in TV shows and otherwise faded from the limelight. But for many people, he will always be Greg Brady, and rather than fight that fact Williams seems to have embraced it.

The actor -- whose real name is Barry Williams Blenkhorn -- launched a new website this week called The Greg Brady Project, in an attempt to build an online community around his former character. The site is powered by a social-networking engine called MyLifeBrand, which allows users to set up profile pages that incorporate information from other social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. But will people really want to become members of a community that is based around a character from a 30-year-old sitcom?

Anyone joining the site -- at least the real fans -- likely isn't coming for the secret backstage revelations from the show: Barry told most of those in his book Growing Up Brady, including the revelation that he and the actress who played his mother on the series had an affair during the show, and that the actor who played his father was a frustrated thespian who would have rather been doing Shakespeare, and who argued with the show's writers over his "motivation ."

Barry Williams isn't the only one to feel the pull of his former character. Greg Brady's brother Peter was played by actor Christopher Knight, who became a successful businessman -- founding and later selling several companies in the computer industry -- before returning to Brady-related movies and TV shows, and later appearing on The Surreal Life. He got engaged to (and later married) one of his co-stars, lingerie model Adrianne Curry, and the two starred in a "reality-TV" show called My Fair Brady.

For more on Greg Brady, er... Barry Williams' new project, check out this post at Mashable, a post by Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion, and an interview he did with the Washington Post.