Thu 22 Feb 2007
Geni - so easy your mom can do it. Really!
Posted by Dave Kaufman under Blogs , Informational , Online Application , Software
Since the beginning of time, not matter your race, religion, background, the people of Earth have a few things in common. One is that we all have a family. You can make your arguments how there is no way you are related to Sloth, your third cousin on your mom’s side, but you know deep down you are. Geni.com (said genie, as in Genealogy) can help you track down the family you know and more importantly the family you don’t know.
The strength of Geni.com is the simplicity. If you know even just a few people in your family, the tree can grow to hundreds or even thousands because Geni allows you to make it a group project where the whole family can get involved. Once you add someone with their email address that person can add the people in the family they know and so on. Geni is still in beta and they are adding new features on a regular basis.
Geni has had a little trouble in the early going, but the good kind of trouble. They have had explosive growth thanks to the viral nature of their service, the high profile and well-connected company leaders and of course the blogospehre.(Erick wrote a great post!) This has caused their servers to be a bit overloaded, and they are working very hard to improve this. They also feel that they have reached some internal goals in terms of traffic numbers that has opened up their hiring as they brought new employees on board this week. (of Feb. 20). They have a multiple phase approach to their growth with right now their main focus users and features.
Overall Thought: So easy that my mom has added more family than I have.
Full Disclosure: TechLife was asked to try this out during private beta. My family has started talking on the phone and email about this and is even making plans to fly to the same city and do some research and visiting. With nearly 400 people already on the tree, it could be quite the event.
Call for submissions: Do you have a web project, software, gadget, technology that you would like to have reviewed? Techlife is always looking for unique products and services all it takes is an email. reviewme [at] dkworldwide [dot] com Of course, we review how we see fit, but you trust your products right?
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March 9th, 2007 at 12:56 am
You do not discuss how it compares to other genealogiciel web sites, programs and services? Like Ancestry.com?
March 9th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Janine - you’re right I didn’t write about them cause I don’t know about them. The point of my article was that Geni was built for ease of use. Making it easy enough for others to use, is clearly how they have grown so quickly. I have never done any previous work on family trees, but this software got me interested in them.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:07 am
[...] Communication is dominant in today’s connected world. Techlife features two services that focus on those connections. First we will talk about keeping your family connected even as they spread out and then keeping yourself connected to news and current events. Managing information and managing the flow of information helps you deal with information overload. Email techlife [at] dkworldwide [dot] com if you have strategies for managing the communication waterfall in your life. [...]
May 17th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
[...] I opened the mail the other day and my friends at Geni sent me some swag. Hat’s, shirts, tanks. And sharing with my readers is what we are all about here at Techlife. Geni has added a ton of new features since we last wrote about them: [...]
July 21st, 2007 at 7:17 am
I just tried Geni for 2 months. I build a familytree of over 1000 names and I found it pretty simple. The problem is that the people behind Geni is so focused on the marketing side of the product that they forget their users. The Geni forum is massaged by marketing spin by Genis own people instead of being a part of the development of the product (that still is in beta)
Seems it’s all dotcom bubble behind Geni, so watch and learn how to make a billion in less than a year
July 21st, 2007 at 10:16 am
@tanks11 - I am surprised. I don’t ever go to the Geni forums so I don’t have much to comment on for that point. But from what I have seen the $ to features ratio is zero.
They have released a ton of new features, that many users in my family have asked about such as printing, faster loading, calendar reminders of birthdays, photo storage and more. They have not asked anyone for money and have not filled the page with advertising.
I would be interested to know more of your thoughts. Please share them.
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:16 am
$ to features ratio is zero yes, because you are actually testing a beta product. Don’t be fooled, it is neither open source nor driven by altruism, this is a business and at some time the investors will need to see a return on their investment. I can only speculate, but it is likely to be a business model similar to Skype (David Sacks, founder and CEO of Geni, used to work on Paypal, before eBay bought it. eBay also bought Skype)
Nothing wrong with that really, revenue has to come from somewhere and I personally like the model.
The future money value of Geni is all about number of users and Geni proudly claims that it has achieved 5 million profiles in 5 months. Look carefully here, it says “profiles”, how many of these profiles are actually returning users? Based in my own tree, I would say 30-50.000. That is not a lot to create revenue so Geni needs to work a lot harder in order to get to the critical mass and become a successful project financially.
To achieve more returning users, Geni must listen to the existing group of beta users to develop relevant new features. The forum is full of feedback and suggestions from the most active Geni users and this is at the moment the biggest asset Geni has. However, several issues posted about integrity, privacy and business practices are just not answered satisfactory by the Geni staff.
Notifications:
The Geni “notifications” has been heavily criticized as a predatory business practice.and for violating their own privacy agreement. Once you have added a family members email address to Geni, that member will be inundated with “notifications” Some of the posts from the forum:
“You require ME to add addresses to your e-mail database so that YOU can send spoofed advertisement messages AS ME. These messages contain links which, merely by clicking, force users to become members. Once forced to be members, you send repeated messages. The member’s only options to end these messages are to; 1-maintain the membership and update account settings (opt-out) or 2-go through a manual e-mail process through your help e-mail system to have the account deleted. Which part of predatory spam practices do you NOT think this is?”
“Geni is a business using viral marketing. The reluctancy of Genis management to meet the privacy request acekiller and others have raised in the forum and externally seems like Genis growth is rather cancerous than viral. I just hope that all the good guys in the Geni team that deal with us will be able to convey the serious concerns to whoever rules the roos”
“I’ve made several family members very angry because they cannot stop the spam without actually logging in the site and manually turning off notifications after all I did was send an invite.”
So some of the people in your family might be excited about Geni, but the fact is that Geni is growing by piggybacking on a few excited users to “spam” their relatives. Yes you can change the notifications in your settings, but to do this you have to claim and validate your profile first. Hence this inflates the number of actual users. You might think you are doing your family a favour by inviting them to Geni, but you are basically forcing them to validate their email and become members without consent.
Ownership:
A person starting a family tree often believe it is his tree. However, as soon as someone in your family has joined “your” tree, and “claimed” his profile you would be unable to remove the tree. You only have the the right to have your own profile removed (if you do, someone in your family is likely to soon recreate the missing profile, without your email address) Geni has found a sneaky way of letting users enter a lot of data, and once data is being validated via email, you loose influence and it practically becomes the property of Geni, as they govern the overall “interests”. I personally believe this to have pros and cons, but that is why Geni is eager to achieve it’s critical mass quickly. It is still dependent on the “few” returning users.
Once Geni has reach a size of no return, all trees will be a part of one big world tree. What would be the value of that for a big Business?
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:58 am
@tanks11 - You raise some excellent points that I have discussed with family members as well.
Beta: The site is listed as beta. And while my mom might not know what that means, I do. I signed her up for a beta software. It means there are bugs, business issues, business practices that are not completely worked out yet.
David Sacks: Your idea is sound regarding the current web 2.0 model of being bought by a larger entity, but I question your “Sack-ism” that since Paypal and Skype were bought by eBay, so Geni has a Skype-like business plan. If anything I see Geni having a MySpace like business plan, amassing a critical mass of users in a specific niche/demographic (families). And since there are many companies that want to be family oriented it makes sense that potential buyers might be non-tech companies such as Sara Lee, P&G, etc.
Notifications: I can’t disagree the volume is obviously based on tree branches/family size. A few months ago it was over the top. I had that same “mom” complaining to me and even though she loved the idea of the service she went in and turned her notifications down/off. So clearly it is annoying, and certainly something simple could happen that when a user is added to the tree with a valid email address they are given a few confirmation options. Option 1 - with email notifications “on” Option 2 - with them “off”
Ownership: As I keep reading their dev blog, the ability to import/export my data in a standard format, GEDCOM I think, will make the ownership more familial than Geni. I can always download my data and leave.
Summary: In terms of business model I think we agree. They are getting users, and maybe a few tweaks would help it seem less “cancerous”. In terms of privacy/ownership/notifications there are only so many hours in a day and Geni is still in beta. To me they provide a great service but I think even they would agree there is always room for improvement.
Tanks11 - I know it isn’t your job, but I am curious if you or the forum users have come up with any solutions to these problems. I want to keep building my tree, and I am sure you do too. What is the balance of good/evil — features/spam, etc?
July 24th, 2007 at 6:50 am
This issue has been going on since January and Geni fails miserable to justify it’s violation of it’s own terms. Hence the recentment.
Geni privacy statement says “We will not spam you or your relatives. Detailed account settings allow you to control which emails you receive from us.”
When you add a relative in Geni, you can edit anything on that profile except the notification and privacy settings. This must be changed. If I add a relatives family data and email, I must have a saying in how this is being used. Once a member signs up, I should of course loose that right.
The current practise of geni sending invitations in your name without any form of customisations before posting must stop.
The default spamming of “notifications” to relatives until they validate their email accounts and sign up to Geni in order to unsubscribe to the “notifications” must be changed to a default “no notifications” Very simple to implement.
A consequence of this forced membership is that a resentful member can easily create havoc in the tree. Geni hasn’t developed any protection against malicious editing/postings in form of even a basic change log. Who entered what and when must be implemented to ensure accountability.
Protecting your existing users and thier rights must be highest priority, but currently Geni is riding the wave of hype and violating its terms with the users.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:01 am
@tanks11 - You bring up some great features. I use Google Docs quite a bit and it has collaboration built right into the interface. They also offer revision history so any user can compare points in time and roll back to that document if need be. Geni’s data entry in all areas could use this toolset.
I am not 100% familiar with their current practice of sending invites. But initial comments during beta were to let me send a message to the person. Again look at Google Docs, when I send out a new doc invite to a user I get to customize the message to them. This actually helps prevent spam filters from blocking the message since my message is from my email and my own text, not just canned text.
I think Geni would benefit from what you mentioned in a previous comment, viral vs. cancerous, in this way. I would be evangelizing the service to my relatives, not Geni.
Again - tanks11 - I would like to know more change ideas you have. You have a great passion for Geni it seems, which usually means that 90% is done right, and the 10% done wrong is just being magnified.
Keep posting change ideas.