Web 2.0 has now brought us a collaborative genealogy site in Geni.com. It popped up in my del.icio.us search today, and I thought I’d take a look.
That’s the interface screen, which begins with you signing up for the site. Doing so begins your tree, and allows you to branch off by clicking the yellow arrows for different relationships (up for parent, down for child, sideways for spouse or sibling). The bit of brilliance is that the field for names includes email, and the recipient can automatically sign up and become part of your tree. It’s a combination of viral and collaborative, and a brilliant way to do genealogy.
There’s also a “background” profile where you can give more info, contact information, etc, so that anyone in your tree can contact you. You can also add photos to your profile, so the entire thing can become a sort of name prompt for those family reunions.
Problems? Well, some families are a lot more complicated than this. My biggest complaint, and I can’t honestly believe they did this, is that the sideways arrow doesn’t prompt for “spouse”, it reads the sex of the selected person and prompts for “husband” or “wife”. Sexism ahoy! They should really change the prompt to Spouse, and allow a radio button for the sex of the spouse. As well, for complex child relationships, it kind of falls apart…step-children aren’t part of the tree either.
The technology and concept is amazing, and if they tweak a few interface issues, I think this is a huge Web 2.0 winner in the making. It’s a social network limited to your family, and a collaborative content creation system all in one. They need to add abilities to export the data, or import from existing genealogy services and much more detailed noted fields (not up front in the tree, just behind the scenes) this might become a huge draw. The best thing they could do is publish an API, and allow for other tools to leverage the information…imagine being able to crawl the tree with an API and generate other bits of info from it.
All in all, a great Beta product, but needs work before hitting the bigtime.
