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In November 2012, Geni was acquired by [[MyHeritage]].<ref name="myheritagepost">{{cite web|url=http://www.geni.com/blog/geni-is-joining-the-myheritage-family-378424.html|title=Geni is Joining the MyHeritage Family|publisher=Geni}}</ref> Since 2016, MyHeritage has kept its genealogical website separate from Geni's website.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.legalgenealogist.com/2016/07/06/myheritage-and-geni-part-ii/|title=MyHeritage and Geni: Part II|last=Russell|first=Judy G.|date=2016-07-06|website=The Legal Genealogist|access-date=2017-06-10}}</ref>
In November 2012, Geni was acquired by [[MyHeritage]].<ref name="myheritagepost">{{cite web|url=http://www.geni.com/blog/geni-is-joining-the-myheritage-family-378424.html|title=Geni is Joining the MyHeritage Family|publisher=Geni}}</ref> Since 2016, MyHeritage has kept its genealogical website separate from Geni's website.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.legalgenealogist.com/2016/07/06/myheritage-and-geni-part-ii/|title=MyHeritage and Geni: Part II|last=Russell|first=Judy G.|date=2016-07-06|website=The Legal Genealogist|access-date=2017-06-10}}</ref>

In 2019 Geni grew to $1.4 million in revenue, up 26% from $1.1 million in 2018. As of 2019 Geni has 11 employees and 9000 customers.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://getlatka.com/companies/geni|title=How Geni hit $1.6M in Revenue, 9K Customers in 2019|website=LATKA|access-date=2020-05-23}}</ref>


As of May 2020, more than 140 million profiles<ref>{{Cite web|title=Geni|url=https://www.geni.com/|last=|first=|date=|website=|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-05-24}}</ref> had been created on Geni by more than 11 million users, most of them adults over 49 years of age.{{citation needed|date=July 2018}}
As of May 2020, more than 140 million profiles<ref>{{Cite web|title=Geni|url=https://www.geni.com/|last=|first=|date=|website=|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2020-05-24}}</ref> had been created on Geni by more than 11 million users, most of them adults over 49 years of age.{{citation needed|date=July 2018}}

Revision as of 07:23, 25 May 2020

Geni
File:GeniLogo.png
Type of businessPrivately held company
FoundedJune 2006; 18 years ago (2006-06)
HeadquartersLos Angeles, California, USA
Founder(s)David O. Sacks
Alan Braverman
Amos Elliston
PresidentGilad Japhet
General managerMichael Stangel (USA)
IndustryGenealogy, Social networking services
ParentMyHeritage
URLwww.geni.com

Geni is a commercial genealogy and social networking website, owned by Israeli private company MyHeritage. Launched on January 16, 2007, the Web 2.0 company stated that it aimed to create a family tree of the world.[2][3] While profiles of currently living family members are private,[4] Geni’s mission is to create a shared family tree of common ancestors. By combining research into a single tree that users work on together, users can focus on verifying information and on new avenues of research, rather than spending time duplicating research that others have already done.

In November 2012, Geni was acquired by MyHeritage.[5] Since 2016, MyHeritage has kept its genealogical website separate from Geni's website.[6]

In 2019 Geni grew to $1.4 million in revenue, up 26% from $1.1 million in 2018. As of 2019 Geni has 11 employees and 9000 customers.[7]

As of May 2020, more than 140 million profiles[8] had been created on Geni by more than 11 million users, most of them adults over 49 years of age.[citation needed]

Revenue model

Basic (free) members can build a tree, offering an unlimited number of profiles, basic support, merging of trees (linking of duplicates), and uploading up to 1GB of media.[5][9] The Geni Pro subscription removes the media upload restrictions and adds premium support, enhanced searching, and tree matching, which identifies duplicate trees that could be merged.[9] Users who have both a Geni Pro subscription and a paid MyHeritage research subscription can connect vital records, newspaper articles, and results from other trees to Geni profiles, replacing the need to manually upload documents.[10]

Features

geni.com website

At the website users enter names and email addresses of their parents, siblings, and other relatives, as well as profiles with various fields of biographical information about themselves and their relatives. From there users may graphically manipulate sections of their connections network to create a complete personal family tree.[11]

The service uses the contact information to invite additional members to join, and builds a comprehensive social network database from the information collectively entered by members. For now users may only see information belonging to themselves, their connected "family group", and to people in their immediate network who have given them permission.[12]

Discussion forums and projects

Each family tree features a family discussion forum where messages can be posted and responses made. It can be used as such a digest for family news. There are also public discussions, profile specific discussions, and project discussions.

Projects are special interest groups organized around historical topics (e.g. "World War One - Casualties"), immigration patterns (e.g. "Norwegian American"), occupations (e.g. "Librarians"), place-names (e.g. "Christ Church College, Oxford University"), or any other subject of general interest that will foster social discussion among members, as well as providing a portal to which biographical profiles may be linked.

Notifications

Each person who has linked to their family tree via their email address can elect to be notified about various activities on the tree, such as when new people are added, if any pictures are uploaded, when someone posts a message on the discussion forum, or someone has a birthday etc. Notification frequency options include none, instant, daily and weekly.

Export

A family tree can be exported from Geni as a GEDCOM file, for example all blood relatives of a specific person, which can be imported into another genealogical software. Geni export has some limitations related to subscription status and to a count of added profiles.

Import

From 2008[13] until December 2010, Geni had a built-in feature that allowed users to import their family history using the GEDCOM file format. This facility was disabled for eight years because Geni found it was duplicating thousands of existing profiles, often with poor information quality as compared to the existing profiles.

In February 2019 a new GEDCOM file import feature became available that allows the import of profiles which didn’t exist before on Geni. Only a few generations of a tree are imported at a time, continuing only on branches where there are no matches to existing profiles on Geni.[14]

Data from public records and family trees can also be imported from 13 supported web sites using an independently developed semi-automatic tool called SmartCopy, which is based on web scraping. Families are imported one at a time; the user can manually edit or verify the information before importing, and also choose between adding the information to existing profiles or creating new profiles. SmartCopy includes a consistency check feature that warns when data may be unreasonable. The user must ask for full access to the tool. SmartCopy is a third-party open source web browser extension that has been available since 2015.[15]

Merging trees

Around August 2008, Geni facilitated the ability for paying customers to merge family trees where they overlapped via common ancestors or living relatives. Individual privacy is maintained by settings that allow tree members beyond a selectable distance of relationship to only see limited information about a person such as their name and relationship to them.

Detecting matches

A built-in Geni match detection feature shows duplicate profiles (profiles that are matching other Geni profiles), and indicates these with blue color. Paying customers may see the details of the matches, and decide to merge these profiles. However, the Geni built-in match detection requires several close relatives with similar names or dates, but allows vague resemblance, resulting both in many missed matches and in a large number of false matches.

The free 3rd party web application ImproveYourTree.com finds Geni duplicate profiles that the Geni built-in matching algorithm would fail to detect, with much lower number of false matches. It also compiles a list of unreasonable information and of missing information in a Geni tree, as a quality control.[16][17]

SmartMatches is a cooperation between many genealogical databases. The SmartMatches algorithm may find Geni profiles that resemble both online public records (indicated with orange color), and profiles in private family trees (green). The SmartMatches information may be copied manually, or imported to Geni using the above mentioned SmartCopy tool. To copy SmartMatches from MyHeritage trees to Geni, both a MyHeritage Data subscription and a Geni subscription are required.[18]

DNA information

Lists can be compiled of profiles that are expected to have the same haplogroup as a specific profile, since they are related on a strict male line or female line.

Genealogical DNA test results (autosomal tests, YDNA tests and MtDNA tests) can be imported from various test sites. The haplogroup of the test person is indicated and propagated in the family tree to all profiles that are expected to share it. Lists of tested people matching the DNA are presented.

Supported languages

The main language of Geni.com is English, but a large part of the website is translated in other languages, including Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. Geni.com is a living social media website and the translations are made by the users themselves, with new translations are added every day. After the English usergroup, the next largest usergroup on Geni.com is Finnish.

Geni supports the use of multiple languages and alphabets, so a person's name might appear in Polish, Hebrew, and Anglo-American form in a single profile.

World Family Tree

The rate at which the extended family trees grow tends to increase as the trees become larger. Some extended trees or "forests" have snowballed. One in particular has become significantly larger than any other.

  • As of January 27, 2009 it contained 7.7 million profiles and was growing at the rate of approximately 2 million profiles per month.
  • On July 11, 2009 it surpassed 20 million profiles
  • On August 16, 2009 it crossed 23 million profiles.
  • At the end of February 2010 it had passed 35 million profiles
  • By the end of the year 2010 it was just short of 50 million.
  • In December 2012, the Big Tree was at 66 million profiles.[19][20]
  • In October 2014, the Big Tree was at 80 million profiles
  • In April 2015, it was at 91 million profiles.[20]
  • On January 26, 2016, Geni announced that the World Family Tree had surpassed 100 million profiles.[21]
  • By April 30, 2016 it had reached 102,890,389 profiles.
  • On April 15, 2019 it was at 131,254,197 profiles.[20]

This large tree is colloquially referred to by many Geni genealogists monitoring the phenomenon as "The Big Tree" or the "World Family Tree".[20] Genealogists can "walk the tree" from one end to the other, or "up" toward the past and then back "down" to the present on another line. Within this tree, people are either connected by "bloodlines" or through marriage. Bloodlines (which can include adoptions and illegitimacy, either acknowledged or unacknowledged) are represented by names in blue; marriage connections are represented by names having a new colour for each marriage. "Straight blue line" relationships are those that have a high likelihood of shared DNA, although DNA connections cannot be proven by genealogy, only by DNA tests.

Geni features a section in which one can view the top profiles on the website. The top profiles include U.S. presidents, athletes, and other famous people such as inventors or historians. Examples: George Washington, Babe Ruth, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin. Geni users can find out if and how they are related to such persons via their existing connections in the World Family Tree.

There are also "portals" at Geni which feature notable individuals grouped by profession, life events, location, and so forth—and in these portals, "notability" in Geni consists of a link to the person's biography at English Wikipedia. An example of this is Geni's Jewish Celebrity Birthday Calendar, a project which "includes people with a Wikipedia page or an entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia or Jewish Women's Archive."

Impact

By 2008, Geni was the chief website operating on the "one great family" collaborative model (now commonly known as "collaborative genealogy"), seen as the next step for genealogy in the digital era.[22][23] Geni's model has been described as a new collaborative, resource-sharing alternative to the "corporate for-profit model" of genealogy research.[24]

Scientists and academics have used Geni for genetic, anthropological, and sociological research. Due to its size and geographic spread, Geni has been cited as a "key social media website" by researchers.[25] Educators have used Geni's visual and social media attributes as a way to get students interested in family history.[26] Author A. J. Jacobs used Geni extensively for his 2017 book It's All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World's Family Tree and partnered with the company to host his 2015 "Global Family Reunion."[27]

In 2017, a multinational team of scientists led by Yaniv Erlich used 86 million publicly available profiles from Geni, of which 13 million were connected into a single family tree, to study the structure of historical populations over the past 600 years, mostly from Western Europe and the United States.[28][29][30][31] Their findings, published in Science, were used to analyze the genetics of longevity and familial dispersion.[32]

Much like Wikipedia and other wikis, Geni was criticized in early years over users not citing sources, leading the site's staff and power users to push the community to use more documentation.[33][34][35] As Geni profiles and projects have become more documented, Geni has been cited in academic journals, though some critics remain concerned about the accuracy of collaborative trees as a whole.[36][37][28][23] Per WP:RSP, it is not considered reliable enough for use supporting statements in Wikipedia articles.

References

  1. ^ "geni.com Site Overview". Retrieved March 10, 2020.
  2. ^ Arrington, Michael (January 12, 2007). "PayPal, Pulp Fiction and Geni". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  3. ^ "Geni.com launches venture backed family tree site". SocalTech.com. January 16, 2007. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  4. ^ "Geni Privacy". Geni.
  5. ^ a b "Geni is Joining the MyHeritage Family". Geni.
  6. ^ Russell, Judy G. (July 6, 2016). "MyHeritage and Geni: Part II". The Legal Genealogist. Retrieved June 10, 2017.
  7. ^ "How Geni hit $1.6M in Revenue, 9K Customers in 2019". LATKA. Retrieved May 23, 2020.
  8. ^ "Geni". Retrieved May 24, 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ^ a b "What are the different types of Geni memberships?". Geni.com. September 24, 2013. Retrieved March 11, 2014.
  10. ^ "Introducing Record Matches and Smart Matches for Your Family Tree". Geni.com. April 23, 2013. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  11. ^ Marshall, Matt (January 16, 2007). "Geni aims to build family tree for whole world". Venture Beat. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  12. ^ Butler, Phil (January 17, 2007). "Geni - Links in A Bottle". profy.com. Retrieved January 20, 2007.
  13. ^ Eastman, Dick (May 12, 2008). "Geni Adds GEDCOM Import". Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter. Archived from the original on May 13, 2008. Retrieved May 15, 2008.
  14. ^ "The Return of GEDCOM Imports on Geni". Geni.com blog. February 22, 2019.
  15. ^ SmartCopy, Geni project, access date 2018-01-13
  16. ^ "Genealogy Software overview genealogy project". geni.com. Retrieved October 15, 2019.
  17. ^ "Home page - WebApp1". improveyourtree.com. Retrieved October 15, 2019.
  18. ^ "What are Smart Matches™?". Geni Help Center. Retrieved October 15, 2019.
  19. ^ "Our Family is Growing!". Geni.com. December 5, 2012. Retrieved December 5, 2012.
  20. ^ a b c d World Family Tree
  21. ^ Geni’s World Family Tree Surpasses 100 Million Profiles
  22. ^ Bybee, Howard C. (2008). "Online Genealogical Research Resources". Brigham Young University Studies. 47 (1): 153–164. JSTOR 43044620.
  23. ^ a b Pickholtz, Isaac (February 28, 2015). "Opinion: Concerns About 'Collaborative Genealogy' Websites". Avotaynu Online. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  24. ^ Wilson, Pam (December 2012). "An uneasy truce: brokering collaborative knowledge building and commodity culture". International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Soft Data Paradigms. 3 (3/4): 204–239. doi:10.1504/IJKESDP.2012.050721. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  25. ^ Edwards, Denny (April 2010). "NDTA and Social Media". Defense Transportation Journal. 66 (2): 147. JSTOR 44123268.
  26. ^ Rankins-Robertson, Sherry; Cahill, Lisa; Roen, Duane; Glau, Gregory R. (Spring 2010). "Expanding Definitions of Academic Writing: Family History Writing in the Basic Writing Classroom and Beyond". Journal of Basic Writing. 29 (1): 56–77. JSTOR 43443890.
  27. ^ Williams, Alex (May 8, 2015). "A.J. Jacobs and the World's Largest Family Reunion". The New York Times. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  28. ^ a b Kaplanis, Joanna; Gordon, Assaf; Wahl, Mary; Gershovits, Michael; Markus, Barak; Sheikh, Mona; Gymrek, Melissa; Bhatia, Gaurav; MacArthur, Daniel G. (February 7, 2017). "Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees using millions of relatives". bioRxiv 10.1101/106427.
  29. ^ Zhang, Sarah (February 17, 2017). "What Can You Do With the World's Largest Family Tree?". The Atlantic. Retrieved June 10, 2017.
  30. ^ "Quantitative analysis of population-scale family trees with millions of relatives".
  31. ^ "Crowdsourcing 600 Years of Human History".
  32. ^ "WSJ".
  33. ^ "Geni Podcast: Citing Your Sources". Geni Blog. April 7, 2011. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  34. ^ "Geni Tips: How to Add Documents to a Profile". Geni Blog. May 21, 2015. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  35. ^ "Geni Tips: How to Add Sources to Profiles". Geni Blog. June 30, 2015. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  36. ^ Jorgensen, Danny L. (Spring 2015). "Mormontown: Collective Memories of a Cutlerite Colony in Iowa". The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. 35 (1): 163–183. JSTOR 26317097.
  37. ^ Richards, Bernard (2015). "William Fox Talbot and Thomas Carlyle: Connections". Carlyle Studies Annual. 35 (1): 85–108. JSTOR 26594487.
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