Web 2.0 genealogy site Geni.com hits 5M profiles

July 3rd, 2007 • genealogy, web

Genealogy is an old past time that’s usually been relegated to the older members of one’s family, since they typically knew more of the extended family network than younger generations. My grandfather painstakingly researched my Scottish family’s history in various libraries, including the Library of Congress, decades ago and traced our lineage from our last known Scottish ancestor up to about 3 generations ago and it makes a beautiful piece of artwork. Since then, almost no one has been interested in this undertaking except for my father and even then, he doesn’t have the insane devotion to our heritage as my grandfather did. So far, my dad has linked our Scottish family with various cousins, aunts, uncles, you-name-its in various parts of the country, most centrally located in Alabama and southwestern Georgia. I’m not sure what software he’s using but I keep telling him it’s probably pretty crappy compared to recent offerings from people like Ancestry.com and the shiny new geni.com. I’ve been hounding him for months now, literally since Geni opened publicly, for him to get with the program and try it.

In the time since I first heard of the site, they’ve blossomed to over 5 million profiles. As the article will detail, it’s not a profile in the typical sense of the word. There aren’t 5 million users registered but instead, each user adds a family member to their family tree and thus, up springs a new profile. While this may seem confusing or even be seen as a way to portray the site as gigantic when it’s not, I think it’s a good take on the word “profile”. If you compare this to a site such as MySpace, you’ll see that the numbers don’t mean everything (MySpace reports they have tens of millions of “members” with tens of millions of those millions being spambots) but the content and what people are doing with it is what matters. I could realistically believe that Geni.com has very close to half a million registered users and in 5 months, that’s incredible.

There’s nothing overly flashy or any big name tied to the site, it’s just something that “works” and this is what drives it. This web 2.0 fanciness tacked onto an old tradition clearly shows that people like doing research such as this and it’s not a passing fad such as Twitter or Pownce are. While Geni isn’t up to the market power that Ancestry.com is, I’m sure that by 2008’s end, it will be and it may even surpass the genealogy site for the king of the hill.

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