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.
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
Great use of Flash ! For some, tracing their family roots is as important today as it ever was. This tool will be very useful.
Funny – looks oddly familiar to this:
http://blog.eva...amilybook_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…
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.
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.
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!
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
I must say… I’m usually negative about pretty much everything, but this idea is pure brilliance.
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
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.
Sascha brings up many valid points. Either way, I love this idea.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
brilliant
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.
LOVE IT!!!!
I read their privacy policy and it seems solid.
I’m still wondering how they’ll monetize this thing though…
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…
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.
Westy – the hype.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Dick is right on, I added a few people and then stopped after thinking about it a bit.
Spam is the problem here.
Another USELESS site.
maybe I need to check it out a little more but I don’t see what all the excitement is about!
Maybe I can finally find my long lost father’s uncle-in-law’s brother’s daughter…
@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.
I like it!
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!)
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.
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.
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.
The idea is good, but the interface isn’t quite seductive enough. They should take a look at http://www.visu...lthesaurus.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.
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.
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…
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.).
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.
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.
WoW!
This is just pure b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-c-e!