What is Digg?114 Comments
- danlin, on 10/12/2007, -5/+60This thing is extremely viral! When you start adding people and their optional email address it starts growing like crazy. Very well done flash-based web app. It is basically social networking for families.
- phlux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23Most families are built in 10 minutes or less.
- dsn1977, on 10/12/2007, -4/+22BEWARE! I read the "about us" and the following quote worries me:
"Geni was founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, Yahoo! Groups, Ebay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firm Founders Fund."
My concern with this type of social networking site is the amount of personal data that users contribute to the "Founders Fund". On the surface, this site assembles a terrific family tree however on the back end the data is likely sold or used for market research or advertising firms. Just look at the level of detail that they build on your entire family.
In my opinion, anyone interested in building a family tree should consider doing so on their local p.c.
This is just a warning to the user.. something that Geni.com should have thought about listing on their home page instead of a user prompt for information. - frant1c, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Love the interface. Doesn't support exotic characters, which unfortunately means it basically doesn't work for me. Hope they fix that soon.
- mapkinase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10How many of us has more than 0 relatives reading this story?
- FlyboyP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9You're right, there is a lot of personal info being entered here. However they do have a straightforward privacy policy: http://www.geni.com/company/privacy
And Founders Fund is a legit venture capital firm, started by Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal. They are also a major investor in Facebook, among others. - kdehead, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10dsn has a point. "mothers maiden name" is often used by banks to verify who you are , especially in telephone banking. (well , in the uk anyway). birth dates are also used as another verfication check.
so , just be cautious. my tree only has names and no other details. - bennybertow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I hope they can somehow merge trees I created with trees someone else created... And handle inconsistent data.
- phprock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I am going to give it a stress test tonight. I have a copy of our family tree that goes back 9 generations.
- jackhynes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7It does support divorced parents. Add the parents first then you can choose which parent combination the child(ren) are from.
- thelawless1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Damn... I had just started building something similar to this, without the Flash though. Back to the drawing board...
- moracity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7This is tres cool. They need to allow import of existing gedcom data. I would certainly use this if I could import my existing data.
- Locuester, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Down as of 1:07 EST. It was a little Digg effect coupled with the fact that they are a viral site in themselves. Imagine 50,000 diggers adding 10 family members each, and so on for each family member.... Poor site - they never saw it coming.
- dsn1977, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9FlyboyP,
Fair enough. The founders are legit.
However, the online community will benefit from considering their exposure to identity theft and and other forms of fraud by allowing their most private details to become public domain. The geniuses at Geni could easily cross reference your GENI data with the payment data at Paypay and your purchasing profile at Ebay. This isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
If you take comfort in an extremely brief "Privacy Policy" then this warning isn't for you. Those of you who think beyond the website should consider that this information is stored on a server somewhere at a great expense. I've worked in e-commerce for 10 years and I have to discover a system that is 100% hacker safe.
I'm not trying to be a fear monger. The last thing I want to do is dissuade people from trying new things.
I advocate thinking first before you hand over your life details to a place that you don't know. - lnf69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Or you could just copy and past. Type @ in notepad, copy it and paste it to the input.
- kdehead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6management team:
http://www.thefoundersfund.com/team_bios.html
peter thiel , luke nosek, ken howery - co founders of paypal
sean parker - napster, facebook,plaxo - jackhynes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6They are working on GEDCOM support. Are there other sites that look this good and are easy enough even for novice users?
- lonelycanuck, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Freaking brilliant!
Built a massive tree within minutes. Amazing use of flash - atrain15, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Cool site. Terribly slow from the Digg effect right now.
- kdehead, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6wow. i managed to build a pretty big family tree in about 10 minutes. awesome interface.
- gummih, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5In Iceland we have a webpage where we access our WHOLE family tree. I can log on and trace my ancestors back a thousand years. I can find a common ancestor with every other person of Icelandic origin (interestingly it's usually about 7 generations back - 7 degrees of seperation).
Read more about it here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1012474
p.s. you only have access to your own family tree, you can not trace the family tree of other Icelanders - afred, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Pretty cool, now I just need more e-mail addresses of people in my family.
- kdehead, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4the VCs behind it:
http://www.thefoundersfund.com/ - pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Same here. I was just starting to have fun and it went down. Plus, I sent out a bunch of invites for a site that is no longer running. A lot of those people are probably going to get the email, see that the site is down, and give up forever. Arg...
- OddSock, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I bet you didnt really shudder...
- Touchdown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Very good. Was able to add a couple of generations very easily
- mahler, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I love the idea and really want to enter my name here, but I am very hesitant to give my personal information.
And I don't like the fact that I am encouraged to enter personal information from other people!!
I don't trust anybody with my personal data. Actually, this looks like a great tool for identity theft or some other new criminal activity. I don't want to make it illegal, but just want to option to have my personal information (completely) removed at ANY time ... even if somebody else inserted it for me. - afred, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The title says "Web 2.0."
- bennybertow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Yes, and it somehow doesn't take my keyboard scheme... Can't they rather go Ajax than Flash? SVG would do the job...
Also some other features are missing, e.g. being born in a country that is not listed (or doesn't exist anymore). - kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I think the best part is that it will be easy enough for my older relatives to use, since they still remember who married who and such.
- ScottBookG4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I'm eager for this site to be back up and running. I've already got two generations of my family entered, and I'm excited to see how it develops when my relatives get on board.
- webconnoisseur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Nice site. If you spend some time in it, you'll notice their are a number of bugs to work out though. Work those out and it could be a hit.
- chucker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Ditto. Their mail server's probably terribly overloaded.
Ironically, now I'm getting an error from digg: "An error was detected when saving your comment. Please try again." - ajbrun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Has anyone got their password for this site yet? I've tried using the forgot password thing a few times now, but nothing's come through. I guess the whole email system must be down, as maffiou can't get invites working either...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This site (in its current state) is a toy and doesn't come close to comparing with the LDS genealogy site.
The LDS genealogy site (familysearch.org) is designed for people to actually put together real family trees that are in industry standard formats. They also provide free offline genealogy software, unlike this site, and access to the world's largest genealogy library. - maffiou, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3From what I can tell, the email invite doesn't work...
Shame ! - pkulak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@bgreenlee
Not really:
pass = getPassFromForm();
EmailPassword(pass); // OMG Plaintext!
StorePass(SHA1(pass)); - Earthacis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3My Dad's the same way when it comes to Genealogy. The site is down right now does it support moving over the files from the ancestry programs?
- TargetDigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yeah, I don't know if you have looked at FamilyTree maker or Myfamily.com/Ancestry.com but they are stuck in 90s. I've pretty sure there has been no major upgrade since 98 and they have the lions share of the market. I think they are about to get their teeth kicked in by Web 2.0 for being asleep at the wheel.
- geekymonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3A friend and I had come up with this idea as well (actually, it was all his idea), but we never got OFF the drawing board. . . .
I wouldn't have done it in Flash, either. - Stormen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5***** amazing. I'm stunned, I've been looking for this.
- ajbrun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I hope they make it so you can download your tree eventually, as it's not going to stay on the internet forever.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I agree. There is no practical use without GEDCOM support.
- lnf69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2How long until this guy gets kicked for spamming?
- ryannerd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2And add export as well.
- joeljkp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you want a growing tree that links together with what other people are doing, you want http://werelate.org.
- mangopaw, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Not that exciting - Wikipedia lists heaps of alternatives that allow you to upload / download GEDCOM files.
- FlyboyP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sure, identity theft is an issue no matter where you're entering personal data. Same is true for ancestry.com which is possibly the most well-known genealogical website. Why trust anyone online, actually? If you don't, then entering personal info on any website is not for you.
- slashdotted, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Does anyone know: If this company gets bought, who owns our personal data? What is the new agreement? Let's say Fox (News Corp.) decides to buy this company like they did MySpace. Can the new company then resell my personal data? Also if this data gets hacked, that's no good, either. Jack Bauer or the mafia could do a lot with family tree info. : ).
Can this company change the privacy agreement when it suits them? Etc. - arnar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I couldn't even enter myself because it wouldn't allow me to type @ (which is AltGr+Q on Icelandic PC keyboards)
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