Following a tipoff from Tony Hirst about a posting from TechCrunch about the (apparently) super-coolio-new-web2-goodness-enriched-genealogical-explorer called Geni, I could not resist trying it out with some serious family data, garnered from my own intensive genealogical work over the past few years.
You can see a small portion of my hastily-generated tree here – I got up to about 50 nodes very quickly and then took a break (by a serious tree I mean thousands of nodes). But back to Geni, and reality: Geni’s great strength is summed up as: point, click, type, and Bob’s Your Uncle (geddit? hey, that’s the name for the rival software product: Bob’s Your Uncle … may only work in the UK… ).
That TechCrunch article has an extensive thread of pro-and-con commentary that is definitely worth reading, but here’s my personal take from the perpective of a social software guy AND personal genealogy researcher.
Pros: extremely simple, great looking, extremely seductive, viral invite mechanism, fairly thorough (embedded photos, understands ‘popular’ relation types, etc), recursive ‘hand-off’ to fellow family researchers, easy embedding of ‘deeper branches. It’s very very cute, no doubt about it: you’re off and flying within seconds, after being greeted by one of the most compelling entrance pages since the original Google (this is no mean feat: genealogy is extremely challenging); you’ve built a fun 20-node tree in minutes, you’ve invited relatives in minutes with a one-click each, and they are off and flying within seconds of being invited, embellishing their branches which are easily accessible from yours, so within a few hours you’ve got an amazing tree and your long-lost cousins and in-laws are buzzing and contributing.
Cons: no import/export for serious genealogists, no ‘flexible relations’ for serious genealogists, no place for supporting evidence, no ‘path-finding’ (how does X relate to Y), too easy to lose ownership to node ’squatters’ (e.g. if someone else has ‘bagged’ a certain email address, even if it is a genuine relative working on their own tree, you are not allowed to add them), security worries if you’re concerned about yielding mother’s maiden name info beyond your bank! Yes, everything is ‘private’, but I guess you can only trust your 2nd-cousin-twice-removed as far as you can throw them, so to speak. Which is probably less than you trust Geni.com – and I was in fact happy to trust them during my little experiment. But once your relatives get in on the act, those little private nodes start getting enhanced mighty fast.
Cons rebuttal: team is friendly, and that stuff is ‘on the to-do list’. I emailed them with a few comments, and they got back to me quickly with an ‘on the to-do list’ reply. There’s no reason to doubt this.
There are numerous rival tools out there – I won’t sample them in this commentary (the replies to that TechCrunch article go through quite a few)… I’m on old-school user of Family Tree Maker Pro, which is great for archival purposes, but doesn’t attempt to tackle the ‘hand-off to relatives’ that Geni is so good at. On the other hand, tools like Ancestry do deal with the hand-off situation. By ‘hand-off’ I mean this: it always used to bug me that in this web-centric era I could link seamlessly between resources on the web, like I do in this blog, but genealogy files had to be exported and emailed around. That’s crazy! Why can’t I just link directly to a relative’s node? Answer: well, there are major replication and validation problems for one, and old user interfaces just weren’t up to the job. The replication and validation problems remain – that’s half the fun of genealogical research, but at least Geni has upped the stakes in creating a nice easy-hand-off user interface. Definitely worth experimenting with, and worth waiting for the day when the catch up on their ‘to-do list’ features!
March 22, 2007 at 10:27 am
Kincafe is a web 2.0 family social network– latest updates from one’s family & friends, build and linking family trees together, birthdays and anniversaries, share photo albums, blogs and other family treasures such as scrapbooks, interests and family news.
Core of Kincafe is “Family tree based navigation technology” which allows one to easily reach anyone within core and extended families. One no longer need to remember different website, home page URLs and email id’s just to reach family.
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For any any further information, please get in touch with andy@kincafe.com