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.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…

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.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.

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!

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)

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

Great! Great! Great!

This will be huge, I am absolutely sure.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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

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!

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…

I don’t trust people with 2 first names.

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.

“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;-)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

http://phpgedview.sourceforge.net/

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

Amy, something is wrong with that adress…

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

Dave Mitchel
“Martial Arts Guy”

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

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

Site Down as of 10:14 AM PST

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.

“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.

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

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

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