Randy Seaver is one of my very favorite genealogy bloggers. (Click here to visit his blog.) He has excellent insights about tools, technologies, and content that genealogists find useful, and he often provides better reviews (and screenshots) of new products and services than anyone else I follow. He is into genealogy – not social networkingContinue reading “FamilyLink is (or soon will be) For Genealogists”
Category Archives: Family Tree Projects
Top 25 Facebook App and Hybrid Business Models
I remember when I first learned about LinkedIn.com, and was the 4th person to sign up for it in Utah County. Soon I got into a competition with two friends to see who could end up with the most (real) connections. I finally won that competition, but we all ended up with hundreds of connections. But I remember when one of my friends knew they were losing on the connections number that they claimed to be winning on "endorsements." They changed their key metric, so that they could claim that they had actually won.
Association of Professional Genealogists Speech
I spoke today at the Salt Lake Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists. The meeting was held in the Family History Center.
I started by asking how many wanted me to talk about the history of Ancestry.com, (after all, these people spend all their time researching the past) and how many wanted me to talk about our vision for the future of genealogy at World Vital Records.
What Our Genealogy Customers Want
We use Qualtrics survey software (which we really like) and have a panel of customers who have agreed to answer survey questions every month. We appreciate the customers who are willing to take time to give us their opinions. We pay a great deal of attention to the feedback. We adjust our work and investment priorities based on what our customers tell us.
Our last survey had 15 questions. We received answers from 1,041 customers. Here are some interesting facts:
Upload Your Family Tree
FamilyLink.com, the social network for genealogists, is testing our new family tree software with GEDCOM upload functionality. The site and the tree are still in beta, but the feedback we are getting is encouraging. FamilyLink members are now uploading their trees and sharing them with others. Just yesterday we had 39,000 ancestor names uploaded. Geni.com got 5 million profiles in 5 months. At 39,000 in one day, we are running at the same pace.
FamilyLink.com soft launch
I have been in NY and Chicago this week, and haven\’t found the time to blog about this yet, but our wonderful sleepless team at World Vital Records has quietly opened up FamilyLink.com to the public.
We are hoping for a few thousand early users, experienced genealogists primarily, to set up personal profiles, tell us what cities they do research in (and where they live), create some ancestor pages, and most of all, give us lots of feedback about the site features and design.
Bambi on Geni (with video of David Sacks)
Bambi Francisco has been my favorite columnist covering the internet for several years. (Read her Netsense columns on CBS Marketwatch.) Today she blogged about Geni.com\’s approach to social networking, and features a video clip of Geni COO David Sacks talking about how he hopes to enable everyone in the world to map themselves to the networked family tree that they have developed.
Catching The Geni That’s Out of the Bottle: Introducing FamilyLink
On January 16th, an amazing, innovative, well-financed company (especially now, after raising $10 million!) launched a brilliant, web 2.0 based online family tree building tool called Geni..
Ancestry.com “Thrilled” With New Genealogy Startups
The Salt Lake Tribune published this interesting article two days ago:
Utah-based Ancestry.com, with 900,000 subscribers the reigning king of commercial Internet genealogy services, welcomes Geni.com and a spate of other online family history newcomers to its world.
\”For years, we were the only ones driving growth in this category,\” said Tim Sullivan, CEO of Generations, which owns Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com and related sites.
\”So when we see Geni or any number of new genealogy upstarts, we\’re thrilled,\” Sullivan said.
Creating a Family Tree of the Whole World
Two people have notified me about the new company Geni, founded by former PayPal Executive David Sacks, that plans to \”create a family tree of the whole world.\”
TechCrunch has a post about Geni today and there are already 17 comments on it, including from some pretty smart readers.
