Monday, August 18, 2008

Some Geni.com feedback

I posted my summary of Keith McCarty's presentation at the CGSSD meeting on Saturday about Geni.com in my post Geni.com - Everyone's Related.

There were several comments to my post, and the speaker, Keith McCarty, responded today with the following:

"I would like to thank everyone for the feedback. As you know, Geni has only been around for a year and a half. We have come a very long way since our inception but we are still heavily developing the product. It was great to hear the reaffirmation of the direction that we are going. Everything that was brought up, in terms of features, is already on our road map.

"Although Geni may not be a replacement for your current genealogy program, right now. It definitely makes a good supplement. Engagement amongst family members is something that Geni is trying to accomplish. For a genealogist, this means more content to further their research as well as a medium to share their genealogical research. We hear the same story over and over from genealogists which is, "my family just isn't interested." The interest level of the content amongst the family is not the problem. The problem is the medium in which the content is shared. When genealogical content is shared through a medium that is easy to interpret, fun to use, and offers features that even non-genealogists are interested in, then the response and engagement will be much greater. That is what Geni can offer.

"To answer John's question, Geni currently offers MM-DD-Year eg August 18, 2008. In the near future, when we start to Localize Geni, we will offer different ways to enter and display the dates.

"Once again, I would like to thank CGSSD and all of the attendees for enabling me present Geni to them. It was a pleasure.

"Thank you,
Keith McCarty
www.geni.com "

My thanks to Keith for taking the time to respond to my post and the comments. I was wondering if he would "see" what I wrote about his program. He did - the next day he was back to work. I'll bet he has a permanent Google search for key words like Geni.com.

As I stated in my post, I really like the concept that Geni.com is driving towards - getting family members involved in finding and preserving family history and memories. Although I had signed up some time ago to try it out, I had not uploaded a significant amount of family material. I'm going to do that in the near future and invite all of my cousins and brothers and daughters to see how many of them will come aboard. If they do, that's great. If they don't, I will be disappointed.

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