The following announcement was written by Geni:
Geni Enables Genealogy Community to Build Family Trees From GEDCOM Files In Bid to Become #1 Family Networking Site
Top rated genealogy and family networking site Geni.com announced today that genealogists can now import their family history into Geni using the popular GEDCOM format. The launch of this features makes it easy to move their research into Geni to easily share it with their family.
Los Angeles, Calif. - May 12, 2008 -- Geni (www.geni.com), the popular social network with a genealogy twist, today gave genealogists the ability to upload their family history from other programs to the Geni site using the industry standard GEDCOM file format. GEDCOM is an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication and is used to exchange data between genealogy applications.
Genealogists who have extensive files representing years of research have been waiting for this feature to launch. Now they don't need to duplicate the work they had done previously.
David Sacks, CEO of Geni, stated, "Genealogists have been asking for the ability to import their GEDCOM files to Geni and now they can." He added "Genealogists who have extensive files representing years of research have been waiting for this feature to launch. Now they don't need to duplicate the work they had done previously." He continued, "Sharing their research with their family in a simple-to-understand Geni tree encourages others in the family to join in the fun and collaboratively build a scrapbook of the family for future generations."
Since Geni's launch in January 2007 as a simple tool to create a family tree, Geni has continued adding features and enhancements. Among these additions are enhanced privacy settings, unlimited photo sharing and tagging, birthday reminders, personal and family timelines, family discussion, virtual gifts, map and calendar.
Geni was a winner of the 2007 Webware 100 Awards, which named it one of the top 100 sites on the internet and one of the top 10 reference sites. It is by far the youngest site to receive this honor. It was nominated again in 2008 in the social (networking) category.
About Geni.com
Geni.com is a privately held company headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Geni was founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, Yahoo! Groups, Ebay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures. For more information visit the company's web site at www.geni.com.
I don't really understand what Geni offers over already well-established websites like Rootsweb. You can add a member with their email and then they can add their info, but that doesn't seem revolutionary. I've also found that a good portion of people don't really care about their genealogy.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I'm staying away from Geni for now. We don't want to have several sites with the same information on them, it would be better to have a larger collection.
Posted by: Steve | May 13, 2008 at 03:17 AM
I beg to differ! The Geni site is much more user friendly than many others, and integrates both family history and family present through its social network facility brilliantly. It is not only free to use, but you can also set absolute privacy on it, so that only those you ivite can view the tree, if that is your desire. My only comment is that up until about a week ago, my GEDCOM was too large for its import facility, but hopefully this has now been rectified.
As for not having more suppliers and just one big collection online - the phrase "don't put all of your eggs into one basket" comes to mind!
Posted by: Chris Paton | May 13, 2008 at 07:43 AM
One thing Geni offers, that a well-established site like RootsWeb does not, is the ability to upload photos. RootsWeb's text-only approach to genealogy is starting to look old-fashioned, in the world of multimedia PCs and broadband internet access.
Posted by: Tucson Mike | May 13, 2008 at 01:06 PM