Rumors of the new startup by former PayPal COO David Sacks to be called Geni started a couple of weeks ago. A few days later, on January 16, Geni launched. It allows people to create quick and beautiful family trees, got a flood of early attention and started to spread virally at a blistering pace. One commenter said “this site could be greater than facebook.” Hyperbole? Yes. But that kind of early enthusiasm is worth, literally, millions.
But all of the early attention has led to some very unhappy customers.
I wrote a post a year ago called Don’t Blow Your Beta where I shared some of the pitfalls that startups often fall into when launching their products. The advice I included was simple: make a great first impression, think about your Firefox and Mac strategies (and have one), don’t ask for too much personal information, etc.
Geni did all of those things right. But it created whole new categories of things to do wrong. They ignored the fact that not everyone is English-speaking, heterosexual and comes from a 1950’s era unbroken American-style family. They won’t let email addresses go once they have them. Other issues. They failed to anticipate early traffic levels and the site went down repeatedly. And, worst of all, a lot of data that people painstakingly entered into Geni just disappeared. Deleted. (Correction: See update below) All those early adopters, pissed off.
Geni has been diligent about fixing bugs over time and communicating with users on its blog, which is the best way of handling this stuff. But the biggest issue, the deleted data, is being ignored completely so far.
I still think this will be a wildly successful product. It’s a strong enough offering to overcome even the deleted data issue. But other new startups should take note, and add this to their list of “don’t do.”
Update & Correction: I spoke to David Sacks, who says that the only some uploaded pictures were deleted, and that no other family tree information was lost. My own data, which appeared to be lost, is still there. The issue I was having was around cookies – the site previously allowed auto login via a browser cookie. That was removed (it was actually a bug David tells me), and so I was being taken back to the sign up page when I went to the site. So apart from people who’ve had photos deleted, the people who are reporting deleted data are, therefore, most likely running into this same issue.
Web 2.0 is everyone by everyone and all-inclusive.
Geni has to improve their Business Model while their is still time.
For what it’s worth I was one of the original commenters that was extremely impressed with Geni, and I invited my mother and sisters to join. They liked it as well, but started emailing me a couple days later, asking why the image they uploaded the day before was now gone, why this or that wouldn’t work, etc.
It’s extremely unlikely they’ll be back to Geni, at this point. I’m more forgiving, but they aren’t as tech-savvy.
Just an anecdotal example, but I have a feeling there’s a lot of them
Perhaps Mr. Sacks didn’t realize that in the Web 2.0 world, beta means released, and many popular betas never get out of beta. Chances are he probably would’ve added support for atleast broken families and adoptions, with homosexual marriages as a possibility. The email address thing is obviously a bug, and there was no way he could’ve expected his beta to get as much attention as it did. I think it is stupid for anyone to be mad about this, especially directed at him.
I’m not mad at all. I’ll just always wonder if my data will disappear again in a year.
Geni needs to address this issue in their blog, say what happened and what steps they are taking so that it’ll never happen again. Earn our trust back.
Sounds like during the transition to a live website, information in the old database was accidently overwritten.
They were also storing passwords in plaintext (do “forgot your password” and they’ll send it to you), which is really bad practice, especially for a site that stores so much private data. Birthdays, mothers’ maiden names–an identity thief’s dream. It’s too bad, because it seemed like a fun service. Maybe someone else can come in and do it right, because even if they survive the data loss, they’ll have a hard time convincing me that they have their act together with respect to security.
Well I was very very confident about Geni and was disappointed to see all of this stuff happening too. I still think they’ll do well enough in the end, but I was really surprised to see some of these failings.
The probably should have rolled it out a bit slower, Gmail style with invite only status.
They have not blown it. They don’t need the web2.0 savvy crowd, they don’t need techcrunch or silicon valley. The snowball is rolling down the hill and will not be stopped. With all the glitches in the first days I stopped adding email addresses so that my family did not have to endure the bugs. In a week my tree is at 137 members and that is with only 6 people adding names. Once we start to add email addresses, this tool gets huge.
It looks like your tree is self-contained, unless I’m missing something. My brother-in-law entered my wife before I did, and it tells me that I can’t add her to my tree because her email address is already in the system.
Brilliant idea, but it seems like it’s been very poorly executed.
This post should be titled “HOW Jeni Blew It” – I thought in only a few days they went into the deadpool.
Are they a partnership with the Mormono church? I’m not Mormon, but they have I believe, the largest geneology archive in the world.
Ultimately, I think the idea is great – people PARTICIPATING in their geneology rather than doing a google searc. and with so many families brought together by MySpace, people are used to it by now.
I know owning TC brings a huge bully pulpit, and I hate people like Mike spent hours entering information only to have it lost (as well as all the other associated problems) – but if I were in charge of the company I’d spin it all as a great thing… and I’m thinking the backers are jumping for joy demand is so strong.
In the end (or by the end of 2007) there’s probably going to be 7 other sites like this one. Then someone will have to create a service to track all the sites people are on, search other sites for information, pages like meebo where you can sign on to all the services at once, etc. etc. This could be really big business.
Wow that sucks. I really liked the idea behind this website. Hopefully its not to late to fix it.
I’m not sure about your data, but mine (entered yesterday) is still there. Maybe it was a temporary problem, and you jumped the gun posting about it. Also, while it sometimes may not seem like it, 5 days isn’t long enough for a website to gain universal traction *within* the uber-addicted tech community, let alone the wider world. So I think saying that they’ve “blown it” is a far cry from reality.
Their site is amazing; they make an important function easy and free, and they’ve found a way to scale the interface from “my mother, father, and childrens names are…” to providing detailed background information, and made it easy. They have some security issues to work out, but they seem to be reacting to community input and adapting rapidly, which is the best you can ever hope for.
They call it “Beta” for a reason! I will still sing their praises!
Hey Michael — we’ve been supporting odd, broken and wierdo families for months, and have resisted to use emails for all they’re worth to respect the ‘tender’ relationships between family members — you don’t necessarily want your brother to get the invite without you consciously taking that step.
So well I hate to say it again, but check it out http://www.amiglia.com which has grown to have 120,000+ branches in the trees and people building their family maps, albums and import photos etc.
Also — adding all their family videos in one place, integrated into the tree — so that you can have a video of a person and have that be the image that represents them on the tree.
Has been great watching Geni launch and see the reactions, and see our users stay loyal
Cheers
Paul
Bla bla bla…
Geni kicks ass! My tree already has 60 people in it… I have connected with people in my family I haven’t talked to in years. This is totally freakin brilliant.
How to make $100M by the end of the year – immediately start working on a German clone. LOL…
And they do not support non-latin alphabets. So if your ancessors are say from Russia you are out of luck. I guess Gini authors have not heard about Unicode, yet.
I personally have not experienced any of the problems that have been complained about. This is the best Social/Family networking site I have ever used. I think it is actually tremendously easier to use then Facebook or MySpace for example. I see a bright future for geni, this is not a tool for the US, or Mormons but for the World. Keep up the great work Geni Family, I know with a little more time you can fix minor bugs, and exceed everyone’s expectations. Besides, this is really the only FREE service available online to map and link you family. Congrats again!!!
I was initially excited by the fun interface which allows users to edit inline feel like they are creating the tree in real-time. I was disheartened, however, when I couldn’t add my second pair of parents. The makers made a huge assumption that all families have the same structure. I then realized that the interface assumed that everyone has one female and one male parent. I wrote Geni and asked them how I could add a second set of parents and they replied they working on that. These kinds of issues can be understandably very sensitive to people and is a big thumbs down to Geni. Inclusiveness is very important for this kind of social site.
But is the data really lost?
On day one, after coming back to Geni a few hours after entering 15-20 names, it seemed to be, as I was again faced with an empty start screen. After clicking on the lost password link, I was emailed a password I never knew I even had, as I certainly never created an account.
Chances are the data is still there, and simply needs to be ‘retrieved’, but the whole getting started, and setting up an account business needs to be made much clearer.
I’m holding off on adding email addresses to my techie-illiterate family members until they iron out the problems and confusion.
Wow. Mike – Your data got deleted!!! Oh no!!! I must have been one of the lucky few. My tree appears to be in tact and my 28 members (some with scanned in pics) are all there. I’ve already got email feelers out to long lost relatives who are excited to contribute info. Grow the tree…
I agree completely that if you are going to launch a public beta, you better have a sound backup and recovery strategy in play [that actually works]. Also agree that the tree-builder is way too Judo-Christian focused and must be expanded to accommodate a more flexible model, as noted in your post and subsequent comments. That said, I can’t get enough of their GUI. In my opinion, it’s one of the most superbly done for Flash impl’s I’ve seen in a long time. So easy to learn and use. Even our non-techie grandmothers might be able to figure out how to use it. Time will tell. Thanks for the update.
wow…a few bumps in the road. As soon as I read about Geni here I checked the site but the were down. It was clear the traffic did them in.
It’s a great product. I hope they recover soon.
You can add homosexual marriages/unions/… by changing the gender of a spouse (or father or mother) after you’ve added them. This default seems very reasonable, but they should add it to the FAQ.
I sure hope they or I can “backup” this data somehow – I’m ready to Paypal them $10 to ensure that all this work doesn’t go to waste!
Um…you get angry because you posted a lot of data to a site that is in beta and then you get mad when it disappears?
I’m glad it happened as too many ppl forget that beta means just that…not ready for prime time.
Lot of beta leave bad impression nowdays. thats web 2.0! quick quick quick!
hey mike –
i’m pretty sure this is just growing pains due to a VERY popular launch (which btw, you helped create!).
knowing David & Alan, i’m pretty sure they’re working furiously right now to address your concerns stated above and get things back on trac… in fact, a little bird i know told me they’re paying very close attention
i’d give them a few days to get their act together & beef up the back-end. those guys have been around the block before, and PayPal was no stranger to runaway viral growth either… they’ll figure it out.
as to the other feature suggestions, i bet they’ve got a list a mile long already. but i think the current feature set is still pretty awesome. i’m a fan & will be checking to see as they make further progress.
- dave “i’m my own grandpa” mcclure
I haven’t had any problems with Geni yet.
@Wade, =) that was funny
I e-mailed Geni customer support asking about how I could change an e-mail address I had incorrectly entered and here is the tacky response I received back from their support person. I couldn’t believe that they would respond to a legitimate customer support request with snide remark like this:
From: Help [mailto:help@geni.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2007 8:21 PM
To: [hidden]
Subject: RE: Family Tree
Dear Nathan,
The best thing to do is to enter the email address without typos, we are working on a way to edit email addresses.
Thanks for using Geni!
-The Geni Family
http://www.geni.com
Dave McClure, perhaps you can send them this suggestion and add it to their list of 1000 feature suggestions. Can you imagine the power of this if they actually went out and licensed some of the geneology data and dangled more and more information about your family commensurate with the number of members you invite and convert? How many people, upon seeing “would you like to know how to contact your long lost cousin twice removed living in the Bay Area”, wouldn’t spam your entire family address book to get such information! Oh..wait…this seems to be highly viral already. Nevermind.
I put 20 or so contacts in, not one invitation was delivered, I contacted tech support, they said they would be shortly. Been 3 days now, still nothing.
The blog speaks of email issues, but related to spam.
I can’t get my data out, and I can’t start over as it says all my contacts are already in the system, what a mess.
I’ve entered a smattering of our family tree, but have not yet invited my sister to input the wealth of data that she has, because I’m suspicious that Geni’s security may not be well-tested or proven. A stolen laptop belonging to a Geni developer, hacked access to Geni’s servers or a disgruntled Geni employee could cause this private information to be spread across ValleyWag in tomorrow’s edition.
And if Geni’s byline (Everyone’s Related,) is accurate, how long will it take before every homo sapien (plus other species, seeing as how I’ve already brought ValleyWag into the discussion,) in the world has access to all of the posted data on all of us?
Plus, there are a couple of weaknesses that I see in the system, that will cause users to be reluctant to provide the data, if they think about it. For example, information such as mother’s maiden names, birthdates and birthplaces, etc., could be used in identity theft, even if it is only accessable by people invited by someone in the family. Yes, we all have close or distant family members that aren’t necessarily trustworthy and even though I may restrict access from a wayward cousin, who’s to say that an invitee four (or four-thousand,) levels removed from me will be equally restrictive?
A possible mitigation would be for Geni to restrict view of sensitive data, to only the person who inputted the information. If another family member clicks on the sensitive data-field, Geni could trigger a message indicating the name of the data provider and suggest the inquisitor work outside of Geni, to gain the requested insight.
Am I being paranoid?
Hi Nathan,
I don’t think the intent of the email was to be snide at all (I would have probably worded it differently, such as saying we should have a fix in place shortly & I would recommend checking our blog for updates). Conveying things properly via email can be tough…I also think that they are getting hit pretty hard with requests for help right now…
Disclaimer: I used to work around David Sacks at PayPal.
A lot of the customer service issues can be explained by the overwhelming attention the site is getting, which the company was obviously unprepared for. No customer service response, poorly worded emails, etc. If they could go back and do their launch over again, I’m betting they would have extended their invitation-only private beta, which they ran for a few weeks before launch, longer. A lot of these bugs will get worked out over time, but it would have been better if they’d done it out of the public eye.
I haven’t experienced any of the problems that people are talking about. I guess I got lucky.
@ macewan – Glad u liked my my comment, but it got removed.
Isn’t blog comment censorship a common rant on this blog when talking about *other* companies? Wasn’t like I used bad language or anything…
Hi Michael,
“A lot of these bugs will get worked out over time, but it would have been better if they’d done it out of the public eye.”
Actually, one of the beautiful things about PayPal was that we launched products that we knew weren’t always perfect. We would, however, adjust the product/service as quickly as we could based on customer/user feedback. If there is one thing I’ve learned, a product manager/marketing person can’t always think about every possible issue that comes along – so I think it is admirable that they are acting as quickly as they can on some of the larger issues mentioned on techcrunch & the geni blog (they’ve already made some quick fixes for a lot of things). I don’t think there is a problem with doing it in the public eye if you are actually working on correcting some of the UI/UE issues & communicating it properly to your customers (blogs, forums, emails, etc.).
Disclaimer: As mentioned in my previous comment, I did work around David at PayPal.
So, the story (or actually, the Headline) goes from “Geni Blew It” to “Geni Overwhelmed…”? I know there are no hard-and-fast rules or mandatory “journalistic standards” on blogs but it seems that the headline was changed only after some basic fact-checking was done. That’s fine, but awkward. Some folks would advise TC to check the facts first THEN write the sensational headline. The approach taken on this post reeks of the “shoot first, ask questions later” method.
Deleted comments from relevant but anonymous commenters yesterday, significant headline revision today; can’t wait to see what tomorrow holds on TC. Maybe it’s just something in the Silicon Valley water this weekend…
Mr Arrington, does your hasty posting in this matter and your backpedaling on the Netflix model give you pause? I’m hoping it does give you pause just long enough to do a little research before jumping to too many conclusions and possibly damaging the launch of a new website. While Netflix can handle it, companies like Geni don’t need to have alarmist postings citing their deficiencies when you haven’t yet done the legwork to determine the validity of the complaints, your own included.
I’m hoping the recent inconsistencies are not going to become the only consistency.
Please be more careful in the future.
Alec
I notified customer support as follows:
Without a Delete feature that is usable to correct mistakes , this site
is unusable. This app is not even in “beta” as far as I can determine.
It should be yanked and is not ready for prime time.
‘nuf said.
Change of title from “Geni Blew it” to “Geni overwhelmed”!! and also the content worded better now.. Is something cooking behind the scenes Michael???
Am I missing something? Why would you want to know your mother’s sister’s husband’s brother’s ex-wife’s daughter’s ex-husbands’ gay partner’s brother’s son’s daughter’s mother’s ex-husband’s brother? For all I care, that person may be death row inmate or a billionaire, it is going to do me no good or bad.
What are your guys exciting about? Want to bet that this thing is going to fade away?
I appreciate the immediacy of your reporting, Michael. But I must say that your posts increasingly lack intellectual integrity, as do your interactions with your readers. TechCrunch is quickly moving from journalism towards sensationalist tabloidism. How about a little bit more thoughtful analysis and fact checking before you start throwing young companies under the bus? One would think based upon your aggressive put-downs that you have been universally successful in everything you’ve ever tried.
Sorry people. I made corrections and changed the title per the companies request. Is criticism warranted? Yes. But I also believe that there is information here that can help companies launch better betas.
A bug made it appear that my data was deleted. Others commented that it had happened to them as well. The company did not respond to a request for comment, and contacted me only after the post was written. I corrected that as soon as the information was available.
With regard to deleted comments, don’t expect to come here and write an anonymous sentence questioning my integrity. That gets deleted, as do comments that I feel are unfair to other people. And the guy that had 8 comments in a row earlier, all from the same IP address, as if he was two different people arguing back and forth. That got deleted too.
Now, when it comes to being unfair to this company – if you look at the three posts I’ve written on Geni (http://www.tech...ch.com/tag/geni) as well as the sentence in the post above – “I still think this will be a wildly successful product,” then I think you are exaggerating to the point of being ridiculous.
Geni is great. Customer service has been responsive. We will look back and see that they in fact did things the right way.
I found these serious bugs:
1. Not able to change the email address. I entered email of a family member wrongly and i am still wondering how could i let her know about this tree?
2. My cousin made a blunder. He entered his mom data and somehow he added her as his step mom. He is yet to find a solution.
Serious bugs.
I figure that a lot of the mentioned bugs and trouble spots will be improved via iterative development. I think they did a great job getting the core system right, and now they can focus on those rough edges.
All in all, I really like it and will probably continue to use it.
The day Geni launched, I was diving right in. I was really, really impressed, but also very, very frustrated.
The fact that heterosexuality & marriage are assumed drives me absolutely insane, but to make matters worse, You can’t add a person and then point to their other family ties.
For example, my grandmother’s older sister married my grandfather’s younger brother. I had to add my great-aunt twice to show her relation to my grandmother, and my great-uncle. Frankly? A total pain in the arse.
It definately needs to be less straight & narrow, and could really use some other kind of color coding rather than “blue for boys and pink for girls”. If Geni really wants “everyone to be related”, then they need to figure out a way to include everybody, not just The American family Circa 1952.
What about kids out of wedlock? If I try to add my half-sister I can’t get it to show that she’s not related to my mom unless I say my dad and her mother were divorced when they’ve never been married. That’s not too bad if we know who the mother is, but I have one relative who was adopted prior to her father marrying her step mother.
The weirdest thing is my family tree is getting crazy lopsided. I noted 4 kids under my parents, but it put me directly underneath and all my siblings off to the right. So now when I try to add my mom’s siblings, it’s way, way over to the right. The whole thing is a mess.
Great, and now I’ve messed up and added a spouse to the wrong person, but for some reason you can’t delete people once they’ve been married.
Who wrote this backend, a five-year old?
Michael, the correct thing to do when you make a reporting mistake (it happens to everyone) would be to write a follow-up post or run a *formal* retraction, instead of just editing the original copy. That’s a big no-no. Granted blogs don’t follow journalism rules (they don’t really have to follow any kind of rules), but without that layer of reporting transparency, you’re going to continue to get those comments that you’ve began deleting. And they probably won’t be from the same IP.
Don’t get me wrong… I like TC and I’m on “your” side, here. But the handling of this Geni editing was somewhat ill-concieved.