I’ve got one of the largest families on the interwebs?
Exactly two months ago today, I came upon a post over at TechCrunch that mentioned a genealogy website to create family trees, called Geni. I skimmed over the article, and it really appealed to me because my family has been trying to get a family tree going for quite some time now. I’m estimating that we probably managed to get nearly a hundred people connected to each other in our family, at the most, which is quite a number considering my family is spread out across 4 continents right now (I’m not sure if we have any presence in Australia.)
I started the family tree by simply adding myself and my parents. My father later on added a handful of people, including his siblings and his own parents, and then the family tree started gaining traction. Of course, some of my relatives don’t understand how to use the interface, but some of them are lucky enough to have someone in their household that is a technorati to help them out 
. Within a few weeks, we hit the hundred mark pretty quickly. Geni is extremely intelligent, in that the website itself is very viral. When someone in your family receives an email which says that they have been added to the family tree, then they have the choice of visiting the website with the link provided and add more relatives. The people that they add are usually those that are directly related to that person (i.e. parents, siblings, children, and spouse’s family!). This makes the growth of the site to be fairly exponential (there is still the fact that a large number of the people receiving the emails will be non-technically savvy, though, unlike more typical social networking sites.)
Fast forward one month later (to today), and I came upon reading a post by Michael Arrington (the author of the aforementioned TechCrunch), and he stated that his family was really getting into Geni. After some mindless browsing, I found myself upon the Geni blog, and I came upon a particular post that was made today, showing anonymous statistics of how many family members each family tree had. Well, it turns out that I’m in the top 100! My family tree currently has 763 people, so we’re on the very brink of the top 100 (the 100th largest family has 746), but I’m pretty sure that once we dig a bit deeper into our history, we’ll be adding more and more very soon 
Popularity: 21% [?]
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Next step; world domination
You want the largest tree?
That’s easy — just send me your email address and name and I’ll add you as my step-brother.
Ugh.
I hope they add some ability to grey-list some ‘family’ members. Whose to know if the thing is accurate?
David, I think because 40-50 year olds are less likely to pull stupid tricks like that and add people that aren’t really relatives, than people in their 10s and 20s are
The older generations are usually more concerned about their safety and privacy so they wouldn’t want to add people that they don’t even know.
Don’t get me wrong, I love geni.com.
I’m not sure you have control who gets added to your tree, when perhaps your 15 y/o nephew is the one who is adding extra people, perhaps his girl friend, who has brothers, uncles, etc. through a tree of their own.
I’m just concerned that I have control over who is in “my” tree. I think, right now in my tree someone has entered their data incorrectly and joined such that their married last name is entered in their maiden name. Now since they joined I can’t fix the mistake–I’m locked out of changing their data. So if I want a nice chart to print out it’ll be incorrect.
It can get tricky to impliment properly. Some of the guys & gals at geni.com are pretty smart, I just hope they don’t run out of creative energy.
[...] Ive got one of the largest <b>families</b> on the interwebs? [...]
Ok, export it to Gedcom and import it in http://www.zooof.com, the you really have a nice tree!
[...] Gary King released a plugin which was called Post Stumbler WordPress plugin (originally to be called the “Stumble Upon” WordPress plugin, but it doesn’t use Stumble Upon at all - even though it tries to mimic its functionality) because that will help most people to understand what it does. [...]
So 700 family members is big???.
Try Rootsweb.com. Most people have to 100-200k people in their trees.
Gimme an hour and I could link 1 million+ people to your family tree and have a database worth viewing which is well documented and accurate.
Geni.com is just viralware. A way for a company to gleen e-mail adresses off the web for free. thye are just waiting to sell their lists off to spammers.
(Actually from the huge number of complaints they already are.)
With almost no advertisng base and no pay-per-view subscrption base, how can they claim to be a $100,000,000.00 company??
It’s all hype. smoke and mirrors my friends. My own family tree runs 400 megabytes of detailed text info plus thousands of photos and tens of thousands of confirmed sources from historical documents and records..
It’s value on the real world market??
300,000,000.00 in photocopied counterfeit Reichmarks
Even my relatives wouldn’t buy it.
Don’t buy geni.com stock. You’ll be a sucker like those who subscribe..
“Geni.com is just viralware”-? Surely you’re trolling.
They do lack a huge emphasis on no-spam (e.g. no truste membership) but I believe they have comitted to not sharing their addresses with spammers.
Anyway your comment doesn’t make sense. Selling a mailing list for spammers doesn’t really make real money anymore does it? They want long term relationships that they can sell products too.
I think you’re a bit shallow and jaded in your analysis.
Prove me wrong though–tell me you aren’t exaggerating… how in an hour can your get this fellow accruately linked to a tree with a million plus people???