Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Genealogy meet Web 2.0

Welcome to the 21st Century! This is the age of fast, slick webapplications. The first half of this decennium we've had the Web 2.0 boost and now we're getting ready to rock on Web 3D.

Aside from playing with new cool apps I've got about three hobbies which are so 20th century:
  1. Model trains
  2. Stamp Collecting
  3. Genealogy
Especially when looking at Genealogy many people are under the impression that it is soooooo boring, dusty archive work. That's gonna change though: Genealogy meets Web 2.0 in the new Geni app (currently in Beta)
Geni is a cool app that has a very neat interface and lets you add people directly, elevating Genealogy to a social bookmarking and networking gig.
In this first shot you see your startingpoint, the person of the year 2006: YOU
Easily add relatives, preferably by email to get the social networking on a roll.
There's lots of Profiling to do on this second screenshot. To really get it kicking it would need widgets and it'll be up for Facebook and Myspace competition.
The third screener is about localising your friends and family

As for social bookmarking, it's got potential, but for genealogy freaks it's a start. The real genfreaks are desperately waiting for a GEDCOM interface.

GEDCOM is the standard format for importing and exporting family trees and works with known programs such as Aldfaer, phpGedview and TNG and every other thinkable Genealogy software. Imagine I've got to retype all 5,000 family members (back to 1500) into this app when I've already have them databased!

As far as the forums are a good thing to go by, Geni is offering a GEDCOM export (in alpha stage), but GEDCOM (v. 5.5) import isn't sorted out yet. It was planned for this release, but is delayed.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Keivn said...

Another great, new and free resource for genealogy 2.0 is http://www.livinggenealogy.com - kind of like MySpace or Facebook for dead people.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 1:35:00 AM  
Blogger Aleister Kronos said...

Ye Gods, VeeJay, do you really want to admit to those 3 hobbies online, to the world?! LOL

Wednesday, July 11, 2007 10:19:00 AM  

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