tree.gifGene­a­logy remains one of the more pop­u­lar pas­times in mod­ern cul­ture. Embra­cing Web2.0 Ajax comes Geni.com, which is quite viral. It offers a very easy guided data entry pro­cess geared towards encour­aging con­tact with rel­at­ives to have them fill in their own inform­a­tion and gradu­ally flesh out a very com­pre­hens­ive tree. Its extremely fun to play with which is enhanced by the imme­di­ate feed­back that you get see­ing the tree evolve. Its quite intu­it­ive to use. I may actu­ally share it with a couple rel­at­ives and see how well the col­lab­or­at­ive effort works.
The big­ger issue how­ever, is that it will remain geared at small scale data acquis­i­tion lack­ing GED import export which even the most ama­teur gene­a­lo­gist is quite famil­iar with. Moreover, it doesn’t attempt to make any con­nec­tions to other pos­sible rela­tions enter­ing inform­a­tion in the wider world. You can search for indi­vidu­als, but only within your own tree. You can invite rel­at­ives to add to your (their) tree, but if they are off on their own doing it already, they don’t appear as if by magic…wouldn’t that be very cool? This really hampers the applic­a­tion and usab­il­ity, ren­der­ing this more of a game than any­thing else. With the data locked in, it severely lim­its how much effort one would really want to throw at it, know­ing that that data can­not be re-purposed or manip­u­lated without hav­ing func­tion­al­ity added by the authors.
It remain an abso­lutely nat­ural and well-implemented web2.0 application…one that cer­tainly deliv­ers a tan­tal­iz­ing glimpse of what an online gene­a­logy applic­a­tion using today’s tech­no­logy has the poten­tial to be.