Over the past year or so there has been a lot of hubbub about the social web but overall I have been unimpressed with the offerings. Most of the time I get no real value out of the social aspects of many of the pages. Sure Writely can be cool - but I haven’t used it to edit a document simultaneously yet and so I haven’t really gotten much new added value out of it’s social features. The same things holds true for every other site I’ve tried. Don’t get me wrong, I like them all, but when I’m the only one in my group/company/family that is using them then I don’t really need the social angle.

However, a new company that popped up on my radar last week is changing that - Geni.com. Geni is a genealogy website that uses flash to let you quickly, easilly, and collaboratively build your family tree. It is really, really cool (if you’re into that sort of thing) and is the first app I have run into that is going to enable me to take advantage of the “social web”. Can you tell I’m pretty excited?

If you haven’t seen it yet, then I encourage you to check it out.

Comments

The Geni Team

Thanks for your blog mention of our site. We noted that you wrote this a couple of months ago. Since then we’ve added some new features and have some new ones on our roadmap for release shortly. We have lots more features requested by our users that will be released throughout the next year. If you get a chance take another look. BTW we’ve added forums to Geni and some place there you will find a photo of the Geni Team.

Bill

I have not tried zooof - I encountered geni first and already have 200+ entries in it and have gotten a bunch of my family members to participate (and thus they have put a lot of time into it).

I would prefer if the different sites had interoperable data export/import formats so it would be easy to change if I wanted (and to take my data with me).

Geni.com is fairly easy, though I have found it to be kind of slow as my family tree has grown. They also have a much better name than zooof (I never would have guessed zooof was a genealogy site I almost deleted your comment as pure spam; it’s still spam but at least it is relevant).

MRZOOOF

Do you like to give www.zooof.com a try?