..Geni, a new site you can map and show your family tree web 2.0 is taking off. Along the way, their thoughtfully considering how to balance viral public connections and privacy…..

My online family tree has now more than 18,000 members in it. I’m also part of the Roglo database, soon approaching the 2m members. It’s getting very difficult for me to keep track of all my family contacts (I use…

Famiva’s Java-applet based animated family network visualizer is also cool, plus it has many features designed to keep families stay current and keep coming back. MyHeritage and KinKafe are also worth a look. And then there’s the flashy Famundo. Geni is not alone in the Family 2.0 space. It does somehow grab most attention on the blogosphere. Kudos to Geni blog-comments-team for that!

Now is a particularly good one: it downloads a bunch of items then locks up IE or FF. Nothing renders. Maybe an out-of-control swf. Beta is fine. Don’t serve your pages if you don’t want. But please don’t crash my whole browser.

Full disclosure: They sent me some swag, and I am giving it away to anyone who has a dad, in my unofficial Geni contest, where I am asking people to answer my straw poll, “would their dad use Geni?”

http://www.dkwo...test/trackback/

It would be interesting to compute Geni valuation taking into account MySpace valuation (6 billions) and users number (140 millions). Roughly Geni to be worth $100 million should have over 18 million accounts.

That’s a huge if. When investors start giving $100 million valuations, there should be a lot less “if” and a significant amount of validation. The idea that a two month old, pre-revenue startup has created anything that could reasonably be valued at $100 million is absurd.

Right now it looks like Geni has been successful in generating signups but much less successful in actually growing an active userbase. These new features might be the key to doing just that, but I’m still skeptical. At the end of the day, these features are standard on every other social network out there, and given the saturation of the social networking market in general, I doubt that any single player, or group of players, is going to become the de facto standard for the way families share their experiences. There are far too many existing destinations and I don’t see Geni defragmenting the market.

This doesn’t mean that Geni doesn’t have the potential to create a valuable business, but a $100 million valuation on the second round sets the bar about as high as it can go. I have to question whether the investors really believed that there’s a chance this will ever sell at a price that would get them a 3-5x return on their investment when they cut a check. The risk/reward proposition here seems to be awfully uncompelling.

which is exactly correct. climb out over the santa cruz mountains and you will find the 80% of americans who do not know what a blog is or the otherwise massive groups of people who have never heard of myspace or flickr. none of the crap we call “web2″ resonates with ANYONE but the single white males of our four or five major metro areas, and not even all of them

>>GENI is overpriced for their lack of a ‘right off the bat and on the front page’ global strategy and vision. They need to at least incorporate all the languages that are **AT** least spoken in the United States to make their mission credible.

Also, the PDF panel had some of the smartest people I know talking about the intersections of globalization and technology : Cheryl Contee, Anil Dash, Chris Rabb and our moderator, Ruby Sinreich.

http://pdf2007....ns/5556/details

Liza Sabater, Publisher
http://culturekitchen.com

My panel at Personal Democracy Forum was, ‘Is Cyberspace Colorblind?’ but I tweaked my focus to talk about how the cultural myopia of a lot of Web 2.0 companies is manifested in their design and user interfaces. Many of the web 2.0 companies launched here in the US believe their markets are somehow computer-bound, English only, white middle class males with endless time on their hands. I can’t think of any one outside of Six Apart who have used linguistic and cultural diversity as part of their core business model, and not just an after effect of success.

I agree with Jay when he says that most Americans wouldn’t use GENI because of the culture’s fetish for the nuclear family … but those ‘Americans’ may well not be included in the 100.7 million ‘majority of minorities’ accounted by the US census. Jay’s ‘Americans’ may well not account for the largest group of the ‘majority of minorities’ –the 44.3 million Latinos who make up now more than 12% of the US population.

GENI could be a bargain if it had the balls to think of itself as a global company, making it possible for families across language and territorial divides to come together online …. but guess what? It lacks cojones. Just look at it’s front page and pretend, for one minute, you speak a language other than English … yah.

Diversity cannot be a dirty word for web 2.0 companies. It has to be grabbed not only as a market opportunity but as a market necessity —look at what happened to Friendster and Orkut when the Brazilians took over. Does anybody ever remember when English-only Americans were displace at Photolog.net –and how ghastly unprepared they were to handle that?

GENI is overpriced for their lack of a ‘right off the bat and on the front page’ global strategy and vision. They need to at least incorporate all the languages that are least spoken in the United States to make their mission credible.

Or grow a culturally diverse pair.

Liza Sabater, Publisher
http://culturekitchen.com

家系図サイトのGeniが、Charles River Venturesのベンチャーラウンドで、生後2ヶ月のスタートアップにして$100 M（1億ドル）を調達したと発表した時には誰もが驚かされた。ここ数ヶ月というも…..

You are sounding like a moron now, and clearly someone who has never run a business. You might be able to say….”if they keep building this, someone might actually just pay $100mm for the functionality”, but you can’t say they will every actually be worth $100mm based on ad revenue. To get there, they would need to earn $10mm in Ebitda annually. Unless every family in the US uses them daily, or a bunch pay a subscription fee, this will not happen – or come close to happen. Ad supported businesses are very hard and only work with scale.

The only people sillier than you are the idiots at Charles River, who must have been smocking the crack pipe when they thought this was a good idea.

Devin