Wednesday, October 21, 2009

New "Living Tree" on FamilyLink

Reading my Twitter feeds this morning, I saw this tweet from FamilyLink.com:



I thought to myself: "Finally, a new family tree program from FamilyLink.com." F
FamilyLink.com has had several cracks at putting family trees on the Internet - first with (what is now) http://www.familyhistorylink.com/ and http://www.webtree.com/, and with the We're Related application on Facebook (which I've complained about many times....).

I clicked on the link in the tweet with anticipation, and saw the http://www.familylink.com/ home page:




Uh oh, lookie there, in the right hand text it says "We'll port over your relatives from the We're Related app on Facebook." On the page above is a link to "Connect with Facebook."

Trying to be fair and balanced, I said to my self "OK, let's see what this looks like." I clicked on "Connect with Facebook" and saw a popup window to login:



I entered my Facebook login information and my http://www.familylink.com/ Home page appeared:


This is the "Stream" page which lists recent Facebook status updates from the relatives that I've included in my We're Related application on Facebook. There was the opportunity to add an update to the Stream and I took it - you can see it above - it said:

"Will the new FamilyLink tree application work better than We're Related did? I sure hope so."

With eager anticipation boiling over now, I clicked on the "Tree" link and saw:



Hmm. Only me? Where's my tree from We're Related? It wasn't much, but it had my parents, grandparents, and my children. I had painstakingly entered the information by hand, one person at a time using the very clunky We're Related interface.

Maybe my data in the We're Related application will get transferred over in the next day or two. I hope so.

Of course, if any "real family historian" is going to use any online family tree application to the fullest, they will want to upload their GEDCOM file filled with all of the names, dates, places, facts, notes, stories, and sources that they have accumulated over the years. Their hope is that distant cousins (those second, third, fourth and earlier cousins) will find the information and make a connection and share their information with them.

I'm going to wait awhile to pass judgment on the "new" FamilyLink tree. I do wonder why they would announce this release and not have the application ready to transfer the information from the We're Related application right into the new "Living Tree" (is that the right name?) application?

1 comment:

Tamura Jones said...

Randy,

Despite what that FamilyLink tweet claims, this site is not new.
It has been live for many months.
I've given it more than passing mention in several articles already.

Every time I visited, I saw the same data as on FaceBook.
The FamilyLink.com site shows the same data as We're Related on FaceBook, because it is We're Related on the web.
It is on the web, but still dependent on FaceBook Connect.

FamilyLink apparently have not upgraded We're Related to the OpenSocial API yet,
which will enable them to offer the same app on other social platforms.
They will surely do this soon, so they can offer it on GenealogyWise.

The continued lack of GEDCOM support is puzzling.

- Tamura