Since a few years, a couple of websites have provided Internet users with the ability to sketch their genealogy online, very much like some of you must have already tried with conventional desktop software (such as Family Tree Maker, or for Mac users, Mac Genealogie).

Nonetheless, these services, be it MyFamily, GeneaNet or Ancestry.com (the latter two being the most successful of the lot) have not had a considerable impact for now.

This was until Geni came. Geni, created by some of the founders of PayPal and eBay, provides a new viral approach to the old online genealogy concept, in line with the now famous Web 2.0 trend.

Basically, its specificity is to add a “social networking” flavour to the traditional, plain vanilla genealogy web services, besides being quite user-friendly. People you define in your tree can be identified through their email addresses. This will encourage non-members to register (at no charge) to Geni, joining officially your tree and completing it themseves: viral growth, once again. Obviously a powerful search engine allows you to browse through all profiles, and contact the ones you’re interested in (your family, I guess), through their emails.

You will certainly discover a number of relatives you have lost contact with, while parsing the trees. And thanks to the email adresses provided, if and only if you are a member of someone’s tree, you’ll be able to get back in touch with those people, very much like other social networking websites. Ultimately, and although the feature isn’t implemented as of today, the trees of any members will be potentially connected to each other – once again, with the agreement of tree managers – thus allowing Geni to recreate the genealogy of mankind ! Geni already displays a stunning 5-million large profile data base, along with a much smaller user-base ; which is still very nice for a website which has been in the market for less than 6 months… I am not sure whether this is the fastest viral growth rate of the Web 2.0 or not, but this definitely remains impressive.

At this point I shall make two comments:

1) Obviously, for me, the request “Steve Danino” could only display my profile (although, wait, according to Google I’ve got apparently a homonym, who won a couple of poker tournaments. Great). But what about Mr Michael Jones in the U.S., Mr Zhang in China, Mr. Jean Martin in France ? I suggest that finding a way through the thousands of homonyms will be a nightmare if further information (such as location, age, etc…) is not filled in. Since these fields are not required to be completed by Geni, we should expect a nice mess in the end.

2) One cannot spend its life registering on social networking services, and browsing them. Although I know a couple of freaks addicted to basically all these services, this will not be the case of the majority of humans. So here’s my suggestion: a leading, advanced social network – say MySpace, Friendster, Plaxo, or Facebook, in which faithful readers of Tech IT Easy will now find a dedicated group – should take control of Geni before it grows too fast. There are a number of rationales for connecting the two underlying concepts. (Let’s take aside privacy issues, although a family tree should surely remain private, or at least reserved to close relatives).

i) I suppose anybody would like to add automatically all the family members to its contact lists, albeit with a number of restrictions. After all, I personnally use Facebook mostly as an online address book, and one should always possess the contact details of its family members.

ii) Furthermore the ability to visualize relationships also proves useful, while it is both useless and unmanageable when it comes to friends – you have got 300 so-called friends on Facebook, right ? But then

iii) it is even more useful if you can access to further information about your relatives, such as the overloaded profile pages of social networks. Something nobody would like to replicate on Geni in its actual form, because no one wants to get pissed off twice…not mentioning the fact that with a 1:20 active user base/profile base ratio, such effort will appear pointless. And finally,

iv) although fully detailing profiles of deceased persons sounds like a bad idea, a short description of your ancestors provided by members of your family tree, will surely appeal to many, all the more since you can leave open messages to them, in their defunct walls.

To say it in a nutshell : I cannot see very well for now how to integrate such different services, but I guess I would be interested by a family tree-centered subnetwork (Geni) amongst a wider network (Facebook, Friendster et al.).

Steve, also a proud member of the Middle East geopolitics-focused think-tank AFIDORA, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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