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January 16, 2007

Geni Launches

Michael Arrington

139 comments »

David Sacks’ new startup Geni, which we wrote about last week, has gone live.

The initial product is a very easy to use Flash tool to create a profile and a family tree - including siblings, spouses, cousins, aunts and uncles, and their families. When you add a relative, there is an option to add their email address and have the tree sent to them as well. They can add their own data, extending the tree, and Geni will launch tools to merge overlapping trees.

There is more information on the About page. The company has raised a round of financing from Founders Fund.

I’ve started my family tree and have added a few email addresses. It will be cool to see my relatives further expand the tree. And it will be really interesting to take a look at Geni a few years from now, as more and more trees are merged together.

Update: Geni is viral. In my test tree, I added my dad’s email address but didn’t otherwise mention the site to him. I just went back to Geni and noticed the tree has been extended significantly (see image below). And now some of those people have been emailed as well.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

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Comments

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  1. Zaid

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    This can be an invaluable tool for folks setting up arranged marriages where a lot depends on family lineage, such as in many parts of India:)

    –Zaid
    iJigg.com

  2. NeoTechie

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    Great use of Flash ! For some, tracing their family roots is as important today as it ever was. This tool will be very useful.

  3. John Butler

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

    Funny - looks oddly familiar to this:

    http://blog.evanweaver.com/fil.....book_2.png
    ( Flash tree, growing the tree by e-mailing out new members, profiles, etc ):

    Which was created in under 24 hours for Rails Day 2006 back in August by two programmers ( disclaimer: I’m one of them ). Funny that it takes a company “founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, Yahoo! Groups, Ebay, and Tribe” AND funding to do the same.

    Yeah…we’re not in a second bubble…

  4. lemon obrien

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

    so…is this another way for people to get marketing information concerning us.

    The great thing about America is/was, you don’t have to pay for the crimes of your father.

    I think they’ll sell the information and use it against us.

  5. rabble

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

    What’s up with this heteronormative BS? I can’t put my family in this site. I’m sure lots of other people can’t to. If you assume that %10 of the population is gay, that’s definitely true for where i live, san francisco, and that somebody has at least 10 people in their extended family, then most people are excluded from this site.

  6. Thomas Aylott

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:56 pm

    Hey! There’s a whole bunch more RailsDay projects that I know of.
    I could get funding for each of them and then escape to Canada with my ill gotten gains! Muuhahaha!

  7. openSermo

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

    Echo NeoTechie, this tool rocks! I followed the link to just peek take a peak and I got sucked in, 20 minutes after the fact I was still filling out family tree info.

    - Ethan
    openSermo.com

  8. permanent hater

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:58 pm

    I must say… I’m usually negative about pretty much everything, but this idea is pure brilliance.

  9. Sascha

    January 16th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

    Michael,

    I have not looked at the website itself yet, but I was wondering if you could provide any further information about security features, i.e. how do they make sure that the trees created and information entered is accurate? Soon there will be tree-spammers, creating hundreds of non-existent siblings etc. to pollute the information. And people will start putting fictional and movie characters etc. in it.

    I love this project, since I had the same idea years ago, and I never created the actual website for it because I did not know how to enforce accuracy. In a way this is like a Wiki, only that in a Wiki it is somewhat easier to verify accuracy. However, when it comes to relatives, birthdates, and names, especially when it goes back a couple of generations and there is no way to verify information, how can you separate valid entries from invalid ones?

    Also, is there any more information on the tree mapping? How to they solve problems where two people might have entered the same person, but with slightly different data, for example Person A enters a great-great-great-grandfather called Bob Hudson, who died April 2, 1823, and Person B enters a great-great-great-grandfather called Robert Hudson, who died 1823 (but no date). While there is no guarrantee that Person A and B are indeed talking about the same person, there is a probability they are.

    I see this working only if you start with people that are actually alive and willing to verify their identity through email, so that you can filter out Mickey Mouse and Pluto the dog easily.

    Sascha

  10. Nathan Kaiser

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

    I too got sucked in and invited my entire family to join and add more links. I am sure my brother-in-law will be thrilled that I added him as well.

    It will be interesting to see them incorporate a revenue model.
    1) advertising (no - brainer, but how relevent can it be?)
    2) licensing the service to larger destination sites
    3) merchandising genealogy related products
    4) premium service…

    I invited the founder(s) to be featured on nPost.com. Hopefully I hear back.

  11. permanent hater

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    Sascha brings up many valid points. Either way, I love this idea.

  12. Justin

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:07 pm

    Wow… I’m extremely impressed from a usability point of view. As a capitalist I too have worries about the monetization of it… but as a consumer, this is an EXTREMELY slick web app. I intended to just play around with it for a couple minutes, but before I knew it I’d added my entire immediate family and my aunts and uncles, and sent invite emails to all of this.

    This thing is going to be big. Very big.

  13. Yohay Elam

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:07 pm

    How come that such a site is here only in 2007?
    I had this “family tree” idea about a year ago, but I was sure that it already existed…

  14. Jeremy Pepper

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    I haven’t played with it yet, but I wonder how it will trump the dotcom era family tree plays, particularly as those get data from the LDS Church, which is supposed to be one of the best repository of geneological data in the world.

  15. whoopeee

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:13 pm

    i am sure everyone in your family tree will be thrilled to be added to geni’s spam lists. they will be just as thrilled that their other private data (name, dob) is in the hands of yet another startup who will sell it when its become obvious the gig is up. and psssst your sister already knows she is your sister.

    i love techcrunch comments, the only people who are enthusiastic about these moronic sites are those peddling equally pointless services. such an amusing support network.

  16. A reader

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    One more question about security:

    Are we all willing to put our dates of birth and mothers’ maiden names on this public forum? It seems like you’re asking to get your identity stolen.

  17. Kieran

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

    I love this - I know other sites are doing the “family network” thing but this is so well done and easy. When I sent it to my mom she got what to do right away, its simple and easy. Now I just need to connect it to my Flckr and Dandelife sites.

  18. b

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:21 pm

    Wow. First of all I think this site could be greater than facebook.

    However, I just realized that I probably am going to get some angry phone calls from uncles and aunts who I just invited to this service. It was so easy, that before I even thought about the implications of what I was doing I had entered my entire family tree onto it. This data is extremely valuable, and I just gave it away to some company in a few seconds. Big oops.

  19. Tim Adler

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    Just to follow up on our a previous reader how does this new site address the fact that one’s mother’s maiden is so often a password to banking related sites. And now this is public information.

  20. b

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    More on why I’m angry I just invited my entire family onto this thing: Think of how this data could be used for the wrong reasons: discrimination, eugenics, at the very least it will be inevitably used for intrusive marketing.

  21. Justin

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:25 pm

    I think anyone assuming that Geni is going to be nefarious with this data is a little shortsighted, to be honest. They could sell lists to spam lists or worse and make a quick buck but lose a huge amount of their patronage, or actually RESPECT their customers, and turn into a gigantic network. Come on.

  22. Alaska Miller

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    so it’s a flash UML diagram maker that’s routed to a central database…

    now you people are getting angry and pissed off and dragging big words like discrimination and eugenics?

    wow… you people need to get laid or throw in a couple shots of whiskey with your morning coffee.

  23. Colin C.

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    This is great for people how can go back a couple generations but where is the section where you can upload a gedcom file so your entire research can be displayed in a flash family tree. There is no way I would want to enter 10,000 names to display my ancestry.

  24. al

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    brilliant

  25. Alison

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    Colin I echo your comments. I’ve just written a post about this on my blog. I’ve got a few other observations too. Its so painfully obvious this has not been developed by genealogists.

  26. Simon Shelston

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:49 pm

    LOVE IT!!!!

    I read their privacy policy and it seems solid.

    I’m still wondering how they’ll monetize this thing though…

  27. Westy

    January 16th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    As has been intimated above, I’m not sure what differentiates this site from the existing family tree sites (Ancestry and Genealogy.com). The Flash may be nice, but the related resources are lacking.
    And also, it seems FamilyTreeDNA is already mopping up the competition for genetic genealogy, and so Geni may be too late to the game?
    I predict it will end up merging with one of the aforementioned companies. Of course, if it has enough funding, maybe it can buy one of them…

  28. Gloria White

    January 16th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    Although it may not seem obvious, I see potential Linkedin competition here. Just drawing out a few boxes explains it.
    Look beyond the tree-you can upload pictures, biography and what not!

    how many third cousins once removed do you know that work at Lehman brothers who could help you with that sale?
    sounds mighty interesting.

  29. permanent hater

    January 16th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    Westy - the hype.

  30. Chris

    January 16th, 2007 at 3:14 pm

    I spent about half an hour typing in information…it’s easy to use, for sure. Of course, as it has been pointed out, it isn’t a new idea, but it sure is easy to use.

    As for showing mother’s maiden name and your DOB on the web…this is not the first genealogy site on the web; there are plenty of other sites, including public databases, where the same information could easily be obtained.

    My beef is the tag line: everyone’s related. Apparently only if you know enough of them to get them invited. Since you can’t search for people outside your own tree, how do you prevent two members of the same family from getting started, doing a ton of work, and then inviting each other to be part of their tree? How are they going to merge/reconcile families coming at this from other directions? That’s what I would like to know.

  31. lnahinu

    January 16th, 2007 at 3:39 pm

    This is interesting. Now I can contact all my family at once to make a family tree. I don’t have to do it myself. We’re going to be saying to all the kids 10 years younger than us, back in my day we had to do it ourselves and call everyone on the house phone trying to make this. We didn’t have this darn fangled internet where you can talk to everyone at once. We had a computer with 2 gigs of hard drive and we were happy.

  32. Dick

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    this is one of those ideas that sounds great in your head but then once you plan it out, you realize that it will either 1) never make any money 2) will be impossible to stop spam.

    imagine that you, all your relatives and all your friends and their families are hooked up….with emails. one hacker can send out emails to everyone that you care about.

    “Hey (your name here), I’m a good friend of your (fill in the blank). She mentioned that you were looking for (blank) and I’ve got a great suggestion. Try think (blank link here) and I know it’ll help you out. It’s help our family and it can help yours. Say hi to (blank) for me. It’s been ages since we’ve talked…but she mentions you everytime we chat.”

  33. Benjamin Kaplin

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

    I’m going to poke at something that Anarchogeek brought up:
    Geni only allows heterosexual marriages. That’s some bullshit right there, because it excludes two of the two most important adults of my developing years.

  34. hornswaggled

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    Dick is right on, I added a few people and then stopped after thinking about it a bit.

    Spam is the problem here.

  35. kaiju

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:15 pm

    Another USELESS site.

  36. Fashion Industry Ceo

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:32 pm

    maybe I need to check it out a little more but I don’t see what all the excitement is about!

  37. Jonathan Jiang

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:37 pm

    Maybe I can finally find my long lost father’s uncle-in-law’s brother’s daughter…

  38. Jonathan Jiang

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:39 pm

    @35.kaiju: just like myspace, fase-book, and stickam are worthless?

    This geni is sure generating a lot of excitement, my friend messaged me with the link a while ago.

  39. Jeff

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

    I like it!

  40. Brent Castle

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:42 pm

    This sounds like a GREAT service. Only problem is, the way services of this size seem to be coming and going, its hard for me to invest time into populating the data. I would love to do it, but a personally hosted application or an app owned by a “big dog” (someone I don’t have to fear going out of business in 8-12 months) would be MUCH better. This company should seriously consider releasing a hosted app (I’d actually pay for that!)

  41. Jonathan Jiang

    January 16th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    Oh snap when using this, who else came across the idea that “hey! Geni should _reaaaallly_ do friends!”

    Imagine myspace friend network, visually.
    Ouch, layout nightmare.

  42. Alison

    January 16th, 2007 at 5:26 pm

    I would imagine they would start to make their money along the same lines as Lost Cousins (look it up). Find a match, through e mails matching in this case, and you probably would pay a premium to be put in contact with another tree?

    That said, not sure how it would work if someone was already in your tree etc. And yes, spammers exploiting the site is going to become a problem.

  43. Alison

    January 16th, 2007 at 5:28 pm

    Another thing, watch about e mails becoming locked into the system. Once you’ve entered an e mail address of a relative, so far I can find no way of taking it out. Even tried to make the said living relative dead, no e mail address … but it comes back to the original address is retained. You cannot delete a person from your tree once their e mail address in inputted.

  44. Curtis

    January 16th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

    The idea is good, but the interface isn’t quite seductive enough. They should take a look at http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ . If Geni took their same idea and used a force-directed layout to build their graph the way Visual Thesaurus does, then this would be more than a killer app; it would be deadly.

  45. Ryan Wu

    January 16th, 2007 at 5:57 pm

    good idea.

    I think it’s like myspace friend network, too.

    maybe they’ll add “friends” feature to extend the geni network.

    Like Linkin or Plaxo, but based on blood.

  46. Sundar Krishnamurthy

    January 16th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

    MyFamily is the earliest and successful family tree tool I am aware of. It was a shrinkwrap software and then went online during the dotcom days. Check it out at http://www.myfamily.com/.

    This looks like a prettier, more usable repackaging of the same idea.

    Clearly there is a viral element to this and I think it can be monetized the way MyFamily did it way back when — charging people to store and access their family trees.

    It is a matter of time before photos and videos of members can be added, I am betting the founders are already noodling on it…

  47. mad dog in the fog

    January 16th, 2007 at 7:24 pm

    I agree with Colin (#23) - support for importing a gedcom file (standard file format for a family tree that can be exported from a desktop geneology app) would be very useful. They should also allow you to export a gedcom file in case you want to take your data elsewhere (or if the company goes under). With that said, the Wiki nature of this is brilliant. I hope the security is 100% airtight because this type of info is a goldmine for anyone who is running a scam (mother’s maiden names, birthdates, birth cities, etc.).

  48. permanent hater

    January 16th, 2007 at 7:32 pm

    The only problem here (for me, at least) is that my family tree is so boring that I doubt I’ll be using the service much… No one is a hot shot CEO or anything really… Sucks.

  49. Matthew Leitz

    January 16th, 2007 at 8:19 pm

    I think this is one of the coolest web startups I have seen. Connecting the dots between families and individuals is a cool concept that needed the internet and some viral marketing to achieve.

    Problem I see with it though is that after I make my updates, I may come back once or twice to see how my tree spread. After that I am not sure why I would ever come back again. I am guessing that it will notify you of changes, but I could care less that my brother-in-laws tree.

    Regardless, it seems to me that a successful entrepreneur(s) have started a business that truly creates value and meaning. For as long as people have kept history books they have researched their lineage. Can’t wait to see where it goes.

  50. Ebrahim Ezzy

    January 16th, 2007 at 8:20 pm

    WoW!

    This is just pure b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-c-e!

  51. Doug

    January 16th, 2007 at 8:54 pm

    about 30 minutes after starting my family tree, my family had added a total of 29 people, most of which were invited with email addresses. This COULD be the most viral concept I’ve seen in a while. No idea about monetization and I do worry about spam (not from Geni, but rather from others who take advantage of public info)

  52. Amy Wilsch

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:01 pm

    It’s a nice site, but a bit inflexible for anything other than a standard judeo-christian 1mother-1father - what about some of my friends who have 3 stepmothers, or 2 mommies? or a harem? or, or….lol

    MyFamily is one of the ugliest sites I’ve ever seen & a good example of why never ever ever to use proprietary language for coding a site. They were also lazy and using MyFamily as a feeder for Ancestry. They’re coming around though since Ancestry use has peaked, and their db is massively formidable. Bigger than the Church of Latter Day Saint’s is now.

    Anyway Geni looks like a great acquisition target for Story of My Life [launching soon] that does all the networking things and this would be a great component OF :), but as a stand alone site I just don’t get it. Plus I definitely don’t want my date of birth and mother’s maiden name public. That’s my “secret question” for all of my logins. Guess I’d better change that to my favorite pet’s name! This info might be available publicly but it’s not smack out there and linked to every other con artist in the world (if we’re all really related; they’ll be knocking on my bank account door next).

  53. Amy Wilsch

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:11 pm

    PS It says it’s public that only my family can see it, but I’ve got some shady characters in my family!!! hmm…

  54. pankaj

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:14 pm

    The site is great from usability point of view but what else after creating tree? I was looking for features like group invites, calendar, photo sharing etc. Yeah I know there are thousands of such sites out there but then limited features will end up with just the trees (no updates in futures). I would like to this other social networking features on this.

  55. Jeremy

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

    A lot of the questions and concerns people have are answered or at least alluded to in the help section.

    http://www.geni.com/help/faq

    ** can’t delete - the faq states that you can delete people that have not already been linked off of and they are working on “intelligent” deleting options. Why “intelligent”? because if you remove someone that has been tied into a dozen different people it destroys the tree

    ** can’t import Gedcom file or export your tree….see section on future premium features I’m sure that is where those features will come into play

    ** privacy invaded and our identites will be stolen….you can’t see anyone else’s tree except for yours, you can’t search outside of your tree, your profile can only be seen by those in your tree, and if you don’t want people in your tree to see your profile you can restrict it more by hiding your e-mail, age, and address information. it’s in the privacy policy

    ** spammers will take over our lives…how? I’m truly ignorant on the technical possibilities here but if you can’t access, search or view a tree besides your own how can you spam all the member of this site? Only thing I can think of is a spammer in the family :-)

    Of course the company behind the site could spam us but if they are truly looking to build something useful here that would be like dell, ebay, or other huge companies with huge databases of information seding us offers for Viagra, home loans and ring tones…

    I think it’s cool and will be fun to see what happens with my family tree.

  56. Chris White

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:32 pm

    I was thinking earlier today that I needed to learn about my genealogy, great timing. I invited my immediate family and one of my web savvy cousins to avoid ticking anyone off over the whole email thing, but the privacy policy seems pretty strict and all of my information’s already out there anyway. Very interesting, if it survives it could turn into something really cool.

  57. mikey4733

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:49 pm

    Great! Great! Great!

    This will be huge, I am absolutely sure.

  58. Rexted

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:54 pm

    It is easy to join this site but why they are not validating the email address before proceeding ? This will be a sure entrance for spammers and hackers.

    They don’t even ask the new members to write some verification code while doing Registration.

    Since it is a requirement to have your email address in registration how safe it is from spammer considering the first two question I have raised above.

  59. Bill V

    January 16th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

    It looks great… I know it just went live, but I’m surprised they didn’t include functionality for a set of gay parents.. or adoptive parents and biological parents if you’ve come to be in touch with them. Maybe I just haven’t found it yet.

  60. Paul Jacobs

    January 16th, 2007 at 10:07 pm

    Pretty cool indeed. However down here in New Zealand the name is so similar to a leading company in the telecommunications and IT sector called Gen-i (http://www.gen-i.co.nz) - I will have to re-program my mind!

  61. Damon Billian

    January 16th, 2007 at 10:18 pm

    Disclaimer: I used to work around David at PayPal.

    I used the site today to build a quick family tree. I must say that the interface is pretty darned slick.

    At least my family tree doesn’t look like a stump yet;-)

    I am wondering if they could charge for users to connect to family members that they don’t know?

  62. Amy Wilsch

    January 16th, 2007 at 10:36 pm

    Damon - how about a charge to hide the fact I’m related to some family members that I don’t want anyone to know? :)

  63. Indimingle

    January 16th, 2007 at 10:43 pm

    If you try to add a family member that is already associated with another profile, you’ll get an error message. They are missing a critical feature of at least allowing you to invite that relative to be part of your family tree (and in essence “merge” your tree with another user of Geni.com). A rare occurance I know but still necessary!

  64. Peter Philip

    January 16th, 2007 at 10:53 pm

    I posted on this last week, but it never fails to amaze me how web 2.0 buzz can get way out of proportion to reality and devote all this virtual ink to a start up and overlook THE dominent player in the space. Geni is cute, but Ancestry is a well-established $140mm company that has hundreds of millions of people in its family tree (both living and dead) and millions of online documents which are CRUCIAL to establishing accuracy. It also has hundreds of employees that understand all of the problems and pitfalls described above (and it already merges the trees into a single tree, which Geni says is “coming”). You can add and share photos, personal documents, and stories on Ancestry, and you can already contact other people that have overlapping ancestors. My sources tell me that they are adding tons of new features in the next few months (disclosure: I do know several people that work there.) It used to be just a site where you could only view online records, but it’s now much more of a social community powered by the kind of user content that Geni seeks. In this case, I’ll bet on the established player…

  65. Chuck Schick

    January 16th, 2007 at 11:04 pm

    I don’t trust people with 2 first names.

  66. pwb

    January 16th, 2007 at 11:53 pm

    This is a great idea, very well implemented. I’m sure they will address the concerns that have been raised, if they haven’t already.

    It just launched today, folks.

  67. Damon Billian

    January 17th, 2007 at 12:03 am

    “Damon - how about a charge to hide the fact I’m related to some family members that I don’t want anyone to know?”

    Hi Amy,
    Believe me, I am sure that I have waaaayyyyy more family members I don’t want to know! Perhaps we can have a “hide family members from xx2y* degrees away” feature;-)

    Skeletons in the closet: I have a graveyard;-)

  68. gman

    January 17th, 2007 at 12:05 am

    Why are people who make these sites so English oriented? The site does not support anything but plain ascii. So much for anyone who has relatives that from outside the USA. Oh, that would be nearly EVERYONE

    STUPID :-(

  69. Ivan Pope

    January 17th, 2007 at 12:23 am

    Fun start, but fairly useless (don’t we have middle names, spelling variants, are unsure of names, maiden names, changed family names, divorces, strange connections - how do we track those?) at this stage. No place of birth or death or anything. Reiterate - the established players aren’t going to bat an eyelid at this challenger, nor should they.

  70. Thaumata

    January 17th, 2007 at 1:03 am

    I was really excited for this site to launch, but here is my experience with it so far:

    - I have a blended family - that is, one of my siblings has a different father from the rest of us. I see no way to put that in. It currently says we all have the same two parents, with no way to fix it.

    - I added my grandparents (who are all dead) in and missed the TIIIINY checkbox for deceased. I can’t delete them now because I looked through their profiles to see … if I could delete them. While I can see the humor in a website asking me if I’d like to contact my dead grandmother with a friendly message, my mother certainly will NOT and hurt feelings are going to result.

    - Do I really want my mom’s maiden name on the net? I know better than to do it, but do my siblings, who are not as savvy? And if I have a child, then I did to them already with no way to fix it.

    - It says that they only share info with MY tree…. but say my little sister gets married, and her husband becomes part of my tree. Doesn’t that mean that his entire family will then be connected to mine, and that they can then see my information? I mean, that’s great for marketing (six degrees of humanity!) but not so great for me.

    - And anyway, I have relatives that are estranged for good reason and I would prefer to share my info with the people only of my choosing on here and not with everyone - even if they are in my tree.

    In all, a BRILLIANT viral marketing scheme but man, it needs some more work. I had to write my entire family an email to pre-emptively apologize for a) screwing up their lineage and connecting them to people they don’t get along with and aren’t related to and b) being unable to fix it and c) putting their email addresses in a place that I cannot delete them from.

    NO GOOD!

    Also - Yeah! Where IS the support for alternative families? I know lots of same-sex couples who adopt? And hey? What about adpoted kids? There are some in my family already.

  71. Johan

    January 17th, 2007 at 2:03 am

    What a wonderful idea, I have tried to start a family tree several times with both off- and online tools, but only with Geni I am really getting somewhere.

    Of course the best part of the whole concept is that you can start building your tree -without- having to sign up! This is so incredibly smart! I went to the site, started building and then after a while created a password.

    If it would have been compulsary to create a profile before starting to build the family tree I would most probably not have bothered to do so.

  72. Sebastian

    January 17th, 2007 at 2:22 am

    @Thaumata
    you can choose if people live or are already dead, with the “living”-checkbox.

  73. chris hartmann

    January 17th, 2007 at 3:00 am

    hmm. nice application but nothing special in my opinion. applications like http://www.famster.com have similar functions…perhaps more. anyway.

  74. adam and eve

    January 17th, 2007 at 3:26 am

    Great, more ways to violate your privacy.

    Remember folks: sites get hacked all the time. The privacy policy is useless against that.

    When someone can’t get to you, how do you think they’ll find you? They might go through your loved ones. Salespeople, secret admirers, enemies, etc.

    Protect your family and don’t use this site

  75. adam and eve

    January 17th, 2007 at 3:36 am

    For privacy, I would install this on my own website:

    http://phpgedview.sourceforge.net/

  76. Rogier Visser > swoot

    January 17th, 2007 at 3:57 am

    Cool initiative > I have another cool example of a family tree social network .
    check out http://www.zooof.com. In beta version already, they will go live 14th febuary

  77. Erik

    January 17th, 2007 at 5:02 am

    It doesn’t appear to be able to do half-siblings. So I couldn’t even get through my immediate family correctly.

  78. carl rahn griffith

    January 17th, 2007 at 5:06 am

    i live in an isolated village so this could be useful to avoid further in-breeding.

    so it’s really an altruistic gene-pool monitor?

  79. Paul Berry

    January 17th, 2007 at 5:34 am

    As the founder of Amiglia, I’m surprised to see the out-of-the-gates success of Geni. Does anyone worry about the security issue of their mother’s maiden name being really easy to see?

    Amiglia offers sharing of family videos, unlimited photos, and creates a private network that’s safe for the family, also spreading through fathers, cousins, as each node becomes their own central site, sharing all media with each other.

    We’re disspointed of course that this never made TechCrunch, (we made LifeHacker, MSNBC, and a ton of others)

    I’d love to hear comparisons, we feel Amiglia has a lot of development to go, but I’m curious to see how this all plays out

    Paul

  80. Rick

    January 17th, 2007 at 7:59 am

    Last I heard David was going to be doing this with a wiki(wikigenia was the working name I thought) Anyhow, this will be huge for two reasons.

    1) It’s a great idea

    2) David is involved with it. Not only is this guy one of the few true geniuses, his connections are -deep-

    Trust me, this will be huge, I’d stake my life on it.

  81. David

    January 17th, 2007 at 9:07 am

    Does anyone know if there is some way to pull the family tree from Geni and publish it on your own site?

    I run a community for a small town and it would be great to have a easy way to show how everyone is connected.

  82. Amy Wilsch

    January 17th, 2007 at 9:24 am

    David (@82), can you email me (personal mail is a_wilsh at yahoo com). I have a suggestion and I’d like to ask you about your community etc.

    Thanks!
    Antje

  83. David

    January 17th, 2007 at 9:43 am

    Amy, something is wrong with that adress…

  84. Martial Arts Guy

    January 17th, 2007 at 9:46 am

    WOW - That is an awesome use of flash.. Thanks for the great post.

    Dave Mitchel
    “Martial Arts Guy”

  85. Jordan Meeter

    January 17th, 2007 at 10:03 am

    I like it so far, it’s just REALLY slow.

  86. Cogmios

    January 17th, 2007 at 10:14 am

    It’s down, i think they could not handle the traffic, but still a great site, I think this site will rule them all.

  87. Ali Daniali

    January 17th, 2007 at 10:14 am

    Site Down as of 10:14 AM PST

  88. Norwegian

    January 17th, 2007 at 10:26 am

    This SW is way behind a lot of good genealogy solutions. There is no way to enter sources, i.e. there is no way to verify where information has come from.
    Take a look at http://www.phpgedview.net. That is a professional tool for making genealogy information public, and it can also link seemlessly between sites.

  89. Adrian Keys

    January 17th, 2007 at 10:29 am

    “How come that such a site is here only in 2007?
    I had this “family tree” idea about a year ago, but I was sure that it already existed…” - Yohay

    Yohay…this is exactly what I thought.

  90. Praveen Rajan

    January 17th, 2007 at 10:45 am

    Nifty app! I’ve started on my family tree, but the service seems to be down at the moment.

    While I like the zero-registration process, I am a little concerned over the email verification process, and password storage as plain text. Issues such as the exposure of your mother’s maiden name compound the need for strong privacy/security.

    In addition to the simple Flash UI, I like the fact that it’s made the profile section seem like fun. I’ve covered a little bit about how Geni incentivizes users to complete their profile here:

    http://praveenrajan.com/blog/2.....plete.html

  91. Andrew

    January 17th, 2007 at 11:02 am

    Yup it was Techcrunch’d, we broke it..

  92. Dave McClure

    January 17th, 2007 at 11:12 am

    i did half-siblings on my tree just fine… have to create the divorced parent link first, then it seems to work great.

    (and if this site can handle *my* family tree with all the broken leaves & limbs, then i think they can handle most anything… even the hillbilly inbreeding ;)

  93. Edward Vielmetti

    January 17th, 2007 at 11:49 am

    I see they are using the Bloglines plumber for their status message.

  94. JRC

    January 17th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

    Site is down all day - nice work!

  95. Pawan Sahay

    January 17th, 2007 at 12:10 pm

    I joined Genie today.This is no new idea, People have been making family trees since time immemorial. But, yes putting it into a software which can be accessed over the net is definitely a job nicely done!!!
    I tried to get in again and the, during late night while I was browsing but the site seems to be temporarily unavailable for maintenance.

  96. Pawan Sahay

    January 17th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

    My company is involved in building a similar site, which has a better interface, is scalable(genie is down) and provides better options for security and privacy of user data.

  97. Beatbox

    January 17th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

    All you haters worrying about how they are going to monetize need to STFU. Do you seriously think they haven’t thought that out? They are probably already drooling over the endless ways with which they can make money from this data.

  98. Amy Wilsch

    January 17th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    David, a_wilsch at yahoo dot com… :)

  99. Jeremy Thomas

    January 17th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

    It’d be interesting to see a mashup with Geni and dandilife.com (which has the “lifeline” for an individual). That would be a great combination.

  100. Amy Wilsch

    January 17th, 2007 at 3:32 pm

    Jeremy - cannot find dandilife.com/net/org online (not even after searching). Got a URL for us? Thanks. ~A

  101. bdeseattle

    January 17th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

    @Andrew - hehehehe. you said techcrunch’d.

    At least they have a cool site down pic.

    Nice job TC. It’s up, it’s down. It’s up again. lol. I managed to get 28 family members posted before meltdown last night. It’s quite addictive, and the Flash GUI is superbly done. This is the slickest Flash-based GUI I’ve seen in quite some time. Now they just need to scale those servers out to support the TC Crowd. I think the viral nature of the app is probably overwhelming them right now.

  102. Dave Q

    January 17th, 2007 at 4:59 pm

    I think pretty soon they’ll make us all downlines and start selling us something :)

    Cool interface though. Geneology 2.0

  103. Kula bácsi

    January 18th, 2007 at 5:16 am

    This is retarded.

  104. Francis Wong

    January 18th, 2007 at 10:44 am

    I went to the site to try out their flash app — then decided to back out due to concerns about the security issues related to a private start-up holding critical data: access to mother’s maiden names, birthdays, etc…

    As mentioned in an earlier post — you can’t delete an entry once its been attached to an e-mail addreess! As a matter of fact - you can’t even see that e-mail address once it’s attached! You can only add “additional e-mail addresses”.

    The best I can do at this point is over-write the correct names with fake names. I hope Geni addresses this problem.

  105. Jake

    January 18th, 2007 at 12:37 pm

    I think this is a pretty cool site. I agree completely about the viral nature; i added just my immediate family this morning and when I went back this afternoon the rest of my family had made some significant progress without me. It’ll be cool to see how far we can map out our tree.

  106. Jean-Paul

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:25 am

    If you like Geni, you will love http://www.zooof.com. Give me a mail at jp@zooof.com and I wil send you a beta invitation.

  107. LaDawn

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    Loved this site and had a blast filling it in with my sister. We seem to have gotten some “technical difficulties” error message part way through and now can’t invite anyone. All email addresses are being reported as invalid (despite knowing that they are not. Hope we didn’t break the beta.

  108. Dave

    January 20th, 2007 at 12:15 am

    Can’t get this working in FireFox on Ubuntu…

  109. Johannes

    January 20th, 2007 at 4:36 pm

    Finally a cool website - with the right morals aspects!
    Heterosexual is the ONLY and REAL way to go!

    Im signing up right now!

    Here in Europe people are falling short in the moral values,
    children is given to this people, who choose to live that way(or are sick), don’t blow it up in the USA!

    Its simply stupid to say that sick persons(homo) is NOT sick, it would be like saying people with cancer is not sick! A cure is the way to go OR they must take the consercvent like no children - people like this need real help - not someone lyring you not sick. Lets its be a win win solution instead :)

    Did the monks or noons get any children? Why should the homos then?
    Choose=End like Dinosaurs OR cure

    btw.
    Ofcause the other tech problems is bad, and must be solved,
    hey its a beta.

    Best Regrads and God Bless!
    Johannes
    CEO at http://www.wiimes.com
    - Talk with your website visitors!

  110. Alexey

    January 20th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

    LOL @ 109. I think he’s dead serious. That is one of the funniest “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” defenses I’ve seen in a long time.

  111. Mark

    January 20th, 2007 at 7:13 pm

    @109, 52, 33, 5, etc:

    I don’t think this is a question of morality or prejudice, although I certainly agree with you that they should allow a mechanism for homosexual marriages/unions. Consider: even adopted children aren’t the literal “children” of the people who raised them, even if they might call them “mom” and “dad”.

    Maybe Geni is just attempting to map out what its name sounds like: the actual genetic links between people, not the societal links. If this is the case, it absolutely makes sense for them not to allow “parental” links between two people of the same gender.

    However, from the terminology they’ve used on the website (i.e., “wife,” “husband”), I completely agree with you. They should change that or allow what you have asked.

  112. Allah Akbar

    January 21st, 2007 at 8:08 am

    #33. yeah, Geni doesn’t recognize the fact that my father married our sheep, either - even though mama had enough facial hair that sometimes I could not tell them apart. it is an outrage, and may the odorous sweat of 1000 camels fill the nostrils of those who dishonor us.

  113. Jeremy Thomas

    January 21st, 2007 at 6:41 pm

    Sorry, it’s http://dandelife.com/ (not “dandilife”). Would be a great “mashup” to consolidate the lifeline of a single person into a family tree.

  114. kat

    January 23rd, 2007 at 11:46 pm

    It be interesting to see a mashup between Geni and http://www.ourstory.com. There you can post life stories, place information, photos and comments to other people’s life timelines. That combo might make it easier to post genealogical histories, not just the dates and places, but the actual life stories that make the biographies and place stories of genealogy so rich.

    Is Geni doing any DNA testing as a supplemental product? Seems like it’d go hand-in-hand. I just had mine done at dnatribes.com and it’s amazing how different it is from the known family tree.

  115. Brad Munchie

    January 24th, 2007 at 9:21 pm

    This is just a lame copy of what the LDS is doing on their new web site - and they announce it as their own idea? Huh?

  116. John Casgone

    January 24th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

    Woohaha! This looks like like web site 101 homework project. ROFLMAO.
    This is a “Web 2.0″ company? Who was dumb enough to fund this? OMG.

  117. Aisha

    February 13th, 2007 at 6:06 am

    Brad Munchie, what are you talking about? There’s nothing new on the LDS website. Is it still familysearch.org? There’s nothing like geni there.

  118. Arba

    February 16th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    Bad idea. Look at the rights thay reserve. You give them the right to do what they want with your content. Look at item 2 under Proprietary Rights in Content. This is scary.

  119. The Geni Team

    March 2nd, 2007 at 5:15 pm

    The Terms of Agreement Arba is referencing are currently under review. We’ll keep you posted as to changes that may occur–we’ll also post updates on the Geni Blog.

    Geni has experienced a tremendous response, especially since the recent Wall Street Journal article. We are working as fast as we can to keep up with growing traffic and layer on new and exciting features–some of which are privacy related and include relationship-dependent displays of personal information. Different displays will be seen depending on whether the person viewing the page is an immediate family member, a blood relative, or a distant in-law. Users will also be able to choose options that shield specific information from others.

    For those who’ve posted earlier: we do support same-sex relationships and are working on he adoption issue.

    The Geni Team

  120. The Geni Team

    March 3rd, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    As promised here’s the latest update on the status to changes of our Terms of Agreement. First we’re removing section 5.2 while we review it. Geni’s intent is that users’ copyrightable materials remain their own per provision 5.1 below—note the first sentence. The caps represent an addition.

    5.1 Geni.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the Geni Services. After posting your Cont