Geni.com

Geni is a genealogy and social networking website. Launched on January 16, 2007, the Web 2.0 company aims to create a family tree of the world. While family profiles are private, Geni’s mission is to create a shared family tree of common ancestors. By combining research into a single tree that users work on together, users can focus on verifying information and on new avenues of research, rather than spending time duplicating research that others have already done. Over 98.6 million profiles were created on Geni by over 5.8 million users as of December 2010.Geni is also the parent company of enterprise messaging service Yammer.

Investors

The Founders Fund, a private venture capital firm, invested "more than $1 million”.

Charles River Ventures, a private venture capital firm, has also invested US$10 million.

Features

At the website users enter names and email addresses of their parents, siblings, and other relatives, as well as profiles with various fields of biographical information about themselves and their relatives. From there users may graphically manipulate sections of their connections network to create a complete personal family tree.

The service uses the contact information to invite additional members to join, and builds a comprehensive social network database from the information collectively entered by members. For now users may only see information belonging to themselves and to people in their immediate network who have given them permission.

New features and enhancements get added to Geni regularly (approximately every 1-2 month).

Family Tree Awards

Members of each family are ranked by the number of contributions they make to the family tree and are given awards within the family tree itself. Contributions categories include Number of Profiles Added, Number of Invitations Made, Photos Uploaded, Videos Uploaded etc. The top 13 people in each category receive awards. This feature urges users to generate more contact and to compete with each other.

Discussion forum

Each family tree features a family discussion forum where messages can be posted and responses made. It can be used as such a digest for family news. There are also public discussions as well as project discussions.

Notifications

Each person who has linked to their family tree via their email address can elect to be notified about various activities on the tree, such as when new people are added, if any pictures are uploaded, when someone posts a message on the discussion forum, or someone has a birthday etc. Notification frequency options include none, instant, daily and weekly.

GEDCOM

While Geni has the ability to allow users to import their family history using the GEDCOM format, this facility has been temporarily disabled. Geni found it was duplicating thousands of existing profiles, without adding much (or any) new information. They plan to re-enable GEDCOM imports once they rewrite the importer to take the close family profiles and screen out the rest.

Revenue mode

Geni offers a premium service, known as the Geni Pro Account, for US$12.95 per month (payable upfront as an annual payment of US$99.95), paid by credit card. Premium members are known as Geni Pros and have the Geni Pro Badge displayed in their profile, have a priority support service, and are able to export their forest (that is, their tree and also trees connected to it) as GEDCOM file (up to a limit of 100,000 individuals).

The company also plans to make money by targeting advertising to users based on the demographic information they provide.