I’ve written about the new genealogy social network Geni a bunch of times at TechCrunch – latest is here. When I first started using it, I simply added my parents and stopped. My dad picked it up from the email invitation and added some people from his side of the family. Then his sister started adding people, too. Lots of phone calls were made to fill out the gray areas, and that’s when we discovered that I have a long dead relative named Alfred W. Arrington, who was a lawyer and a preacher, and also published poetry and a number of books.
Alfred was either my great-great grandfather or my great-great-uncle. We’re trying to locate a copy of at least one of his books – apparently there’s one in some university somewhere.
Awesome.
If only Google Book Search had gotten to it…
I remember your post on TechCrunch, i went to sign up to find out about the service and filled out my father, my mother and sister information.
I found out that they never logged in and that my wet dream having a complete family tree will never happen.
It will be really interesting to see what they will do with their money now they got funded.
A lot of people don’t understand the value of Geni; what do you suppose the value is?
I personally think that it’s the relationship database. If you have a “blank slate” with 3 million connections mapped out, then you have a lot of community trust that could be used to expand trust into other services.
My personal feeling is that we’ll eventually see a “social web”, whereby people’s connections are mapped out (both manually and via data mining). That “social grid” could then be applied to many services to build trust or intelligence.
I hate to be a hater of technology for hating’s sake, but … their Flash app. totally sucks. Chews up tons of CPU and is so slow–literally 5-6 seconds before a UI event after a click. WTF?
If they’d get rid of that Flash app. and do it with DHTML and AJAX, I think they might have a decent product on their hands.
My mom loves Geni. She’s sort of new to the whole internets thing but I set up the foundation for a tree (me, my sisters and parents) and then showed her how to enter names/emails and she’s put in something like 90 new names. She loves it. She’s called/talked to people she hasn’t talked to in years to get more information. I think the Geni people have really built something pretty cool.
“Geni is private and secture: only the people in your family tree can see your tree and profile.” Or perhaps he people in your tree and profile, and any entity so authorized by either the Patriot Act (not to mention a Eastern European Hacker with a bit of skill and time to kill) …
Whoops, hit the Submit button before I edited …Apologies for that!
“Geni is private and secture: only the people in your family tree can see your tree and profile.” Or perhaps that should read: only the people in your family tree, and any entity so authorized by the Patriot Act (along with any Eastern European Hackers with a bit of skill and the time to kill) …
I too love Geni. I went home to visit my mom and step-dad last weekend and my mom and I ended up putting about 40 past/present family members into our geni family tree. My mom even called my cousin in California in hopes of getting her involved (we didn’t have her e-mail address).
geni smells because there is no office address and no snail mail address on the site
never trust Mr Anonymous
and why not do the Arrington tree and family history stuff face to face off line?
Older relatives need hugs more than emails
HughW
Geni is as viral and effective as your family collectively is – since my brother passed this onto me (when it was still riddled with show-stopping bugs), the only real contributors happened to be him and myself! This was partially due to having relatives sprawled across India (where a concept like Geni is not as intuitive as you would expect it to be).
hey mike… one might infer from the URL for your great uncle alfred that somebody in your family lives in West Virginia. do tell?
(and i thought i was the only hillbilly geek outside of john chambers
Mike, I’m at 763 people in my family tree on Geni so far
How many do you have? 
I am a regular visitor of your blog and always find something new at your site. I have come up with some new findings and want to share it with you.
I just launched a family 2.0 social network and would like to invite you for the review of the service and provide feedback to andy@kincafe.com.
Thanks
xavier
we have been reading your post and noticed you question. We just introduced Kincafe- http://www.kincafe.com. This is for families to come together. Children can get updates about families.
We just launched a family 2.0 social network. We would like to invite you for the review of the service and provide feedback to us at andy@kincafe.com
Thanks
Andy.