nonsmokingarea.com

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?

cogmap is definitely among the more interesting web-apps popping up these days. best described as ‘the Wikipedia for organization charts of real-life companies”, the application offers a graphical Wiki specialized in mapping of organizational hierarchies. using an AJAxified editor, contributors - weither they officially represent the mapped company or not - are invited to collaborate on charts. as rev2 points out, reliability of data is not always on par with reality. the AJAX-interface seems to be rather unresponsive, and MBAs might miss basic organizational elements like staff units.

No Inc, builders of cogmap, need to round off the featureset of what could evolve into a serious resource for business-research. for liable, up-2-date information, cogmap will probably need to implement functionality, allowing officially approved company-representatives to freeze in organizational structures. until this has happened, anybody can be CEO of Google for five minutes