Rob's Blog

22/1: Geni is out the bottle - Everyone’s related

Last week, Geni was launched.  Geni the company is only six months old and they have just released in beta a hosted family tree.  It has a Web2.0 type front-end allowing you to enter your own family very easily.  It is surprisingly addictive.  It uses your e-mail address as a username and basically allows anyone with a username to edit their own family.  Their ambitious goal is to get a family tree of the whole world!  Basically they will support merging of family trees once you get the same person in two trees.  I get the impression that much of the detail is still to be worked out and that Geni will use its beta users to help devise the way forward.

Why not try it out?  Just add your immediate family and then pass on the job to one of your kids!!  Just click on the Geni icon below.



This is an ideal application for the web.  Why?  Well there were already a whole host of family tree applications available but it was always difficult to share the information between family members.  Basically you had silos of data and no easy way for others to collaborate in the exercise of building the trees.  Now all you need is an e-mail address for a relative and you can invite them to help - no software install required.  You can leave messages for others in the tree without having to know their e-mail address.

"So what?" you might ask.  I think that this company could be on to something very big.  This is Social Networking on a massive scale and could easily rival the other big players like MySpace and FaceBook.  These trees will become huge.  So long as the company manages the privacy issues properly, there could be huge applications built from that data.  It could be my family address book.  It could remind me about birthdays.  It will be my family photo album.  There are so many possibilities.

If they ever decide to go public, I'll want some shares.  However, I think it's more likely that a big player like Google may come along and snap them up before they get too big.

I don't think Geni have even worried too much about their long term business model.  Advertising is obviously a possibility. Imagine being able to advertise but only to those with a known age and gender or known location.  However, there will be plenty of different ways that they can add value and charge for their services.