Geni: Everyone’s Related

Posted on | January 16, 2007 | 1 Comment

the brainchild of former PayPal executive David Sacks, Geni does for genealogy what Cogmap is doing for organizational hierarchies. the collaborative online-tool for building family-trees is Flash-based and persuades new users with a very low entry-barrier: start mapping your tree just by entering name & email…add your immediate family-members and they will automatically receive notification on your genealogy-research (including direct-links and the possibility to add detail-info). the user-interface is dead-easy and much more responsive than Cogmap’s AJAX-solution. the official blog emphasizes the obvious importance of privacy when dealing with these sort of data. while I tend to agree I still hope that Geni will find a way to build a semi-anonymized, worldwide-mashed-up familytree someday… wouldn’t that be cool?

 

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