Showing posts with label geni. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geni. Show all posts

11 September 2007

The Story of Our Lives

TechCrunch notes the rise of a new class of services:

part blogging, part genealogy and part something unique. They are focused on the very long term - getting and then keeping customers for decades, and encouraging friends and especially family members to join, too. Once they’re hooked, they’ve spent so much time building content that they are very unlikely to ever leave.

Nicely viral, obviously, but what really interests me is the potential of making all of this information freely available across the Net, rather than just locking it in silos (as I imagine much will be). Imagine an intelligent spider, searching, sifting and correlating the information: it would allow a tapestry of life to be spun across the entire planet (or at least those parts using such sites). Tricky privacy issues, of course....

17 January 2007

Gene Geni

This is quite clever - although it's a pity it uses Flash. You start to build your family tree on-screen, adding emails to the names where available. These are then sent info about the site, and obviously encouraged to add their own local knowledge of the tree. So the system is viral, and is based on two networks: that of family connections, and that of the Internet.

It's easy to foresee the day when we know all our public genealogical connections in this way - a stage before our genomes are used to show all the private ones, too.... (Via TechCrunch.)