MyHeritage -- Snaps Up Geni.com

Private User - Let's be nice to the Geni staff.

Being bought out - is seldom a lot of fun - especially during the 1st year.
It consists of lots of work, many changes and uncertainty for the staff.

Just do your best staff - and good luck :)

that's asking for nothing short of a xmas miricle

So. My Pro account is set to renew on Dec 3. Is it worth it now?

Post deleted by Private User on Nov 29, 2012 at 5:23 PM

David. Your comment makes no sense. I buy a car, I expect it to work. If the price goes up after I buy it, I don't expect to pay more. :)

I believe I first bought PRO in 2008. It was worth it then to me. My expectation is that it will continue to be worth while in its evolving iterations.

Having been through mergers myself (including some hammering on the technology that quickly followed) I'd give Geni staff a chance to release the information as they can.

Erica,
I hope you are right! I guess it would have made more sense to me to announce the Pro's new benefits, as well as making the other parts free, that way everyone is happy!
Jill

The face that MyHeritage insisted on Geni going back to having the ability to have unlimited people on their tree and have regular members merge shows the short-sightedness of that policy.

Congratulations to MyHeritage which seems to have a better vision than Geni.

http://www.geni.com/blog/geni-is-joining-the-myheritage-family-3784...

http://help.geni.com/forums/21545466-things-to-know

http://help.geni.com/entries/22475611-how-will-the-two-websites-ope...

Peter, Thanks for posting those links. Looks like there are some nice possibilities in the future.

Jill you never worked in PR ! You're reminding me of the good old days trying to coordinate mailings and press releases and so on.

Give the boys & girls a chance to crank it on out. They're probably still on Thanksgiving overload - I know I am.

<-------works in PR and would have had it coordinated before the announcement. (so hire me!) lol

Just a few thoughts regarding the new privacy rules....

1. It will make it much more difficult to find living relatives one does not know about. For example, I had no idea how big my Dutch family actually was until I joined Geni two or so months ago. I would have never been able to find all the 3rd and 4th cousins I have if their profiles were completely private due to the fact that they are living.... so we just enter all profiles as deceased when we don't know now basically

2. I think all profiles of people deceased for X number of years at this point should be automatically made public. If Geni's true spirit is to make a world-wide family tree, then there is no reason to have people from the early 1900's and beyond marked private regardless of the relationship to the profile manager. I could make half the pre-war Dutch on here private if I truly wanted to (as can many users w/ their relatives), but that just defeats the purpose.

I'm very grateful to Geni and the users here as I would have never found as many Dutch relatives on my own had I not joined. That said, private profiles and private trees full of deceased individuals doesn't serve the greater good.

Just my two cents for what it's worth :))

Post deleted by Private User on Nov 30, 2012 at 10:10 AM

Good points, Wendi. The tree model on Geni leads to all the areas you did not know before - and may be less likely to find out without collaborating on a World Family Tree.

Beth Beeman there is great benefit to being a Pro member! With Geni Pro, you have access to tools that will help you grow your family tree easier. As a reminder, tree matches are still a Pro feature. And as we add MyHeritage's Smart Matching technology, they will only get better. Smart Matching will also automatically search over 1 billion MyHeritage profiles to help you discover new relatives even faster.

Additional Pro features include enhanced search, unlimited data uploads and premium customer support. Over the next few months, we will continue to add more features to Geni and we will keep you apprised about new benefits and capabilities.

Wendi - I am very much against any reduction in the Profiles Geni allows us to make Private. To me, this would be a major violation of promises made, infringe on folks' privacy thanks to the Timeline Events being shared with other profiles, info in the About often including info on others, etc.

Post deleted by Private User on Nov 30, 2012 at 9:16 PM

from what i read they were planning on keeping them as separate entities while making 'improvements' to myheritage complete with intact staffing. however, its my observation that what usually happens in situations like this is that within 2 years staff on the site that was bought out (in this case geni) tends to get restructured as it were and people get replaced. For example, when ancestry was first sold, they said staffing would stay the same, then relocated head office. staffing changes followed showing the door to a few people in terms of pink slips or sending em to iseral to learn from a company that does things a lot better would be great and i will not name who i think should get them

Private User That's what makes the world go round.....

Do you all forget about the mess before September 2011? When everybody were able to merge profiles.
And now you are talking about making profiles public. Only living persons should stay private, as far as I can understand.
Does Geni want it all to be as mess once more?
I'll be quietly looking to what happens from the sideline. But don't spoil my tree.

You can google public profiles. In this way you are forced to hide your documentation. Using Dropbox is a very good way to keep your information inside your familygroup.
But that's not the idea with Geni, is it? ;-)
Stop letting people be able to google information from Geni profiles.

I agree, Noah. In my opinion, MyHeritage user friendly applications. This is evidenced by many more users than in geni.
Jiri

P.S. But it is of course just my personal opinion.

henny
Remember that Geni pages are not static web pages, - as a Geni user Google indexes your name unless you have disabled that access in your account setting, - when clicking the link to what Google have indexed what get displayed is not what Google see, but what you as the user clicking that link have access to see, and if logged in as yourself it is natural that absolutely all information is displayed.

i can see both sides of this debate there are certin conditions when you would want members private... example being at least 2 generations before you living or deceased so as a lock down against id theft

Michael
If you are not logged into Geni you are able to watch the information in About Me and the Timeline.
And my guess - if the enclosed documents are public as the profile in question, you'll be able to google them too.
All our work just lay there to be picked up by none-members of Geni.
And if all deseased profiles will be made public in the future .... what a mess.

Hej, don't you understand business? Tutak sold all data, got cash and will disappear; so what - I also am a lifetime member and have expected something like this after all the "strategy" changes during the last year.
Tutak simply wanted to make money.l

First, a question for Geni:
As a user that did not pay to go Pro, I have received that message from Geni, regarding free tree matches.
I have tried to do that, but still seems I am being asked to pay for it.
So is this "free merging" going to take effect at a later date?

Second, for the Geni users that were Pro and are upset at the (proposed?) free merging for all users:
I understand your frustration, as no one wants to learn they could have obtained a service for free at a later date. But if you think about it, this is the same when a price is later reduced on a TV or other article; yes, it s**cks to see others paying less, but is a fact of a free market.
Also, think that now you will have a greatly expanded number of users that you can match trees with ! I have seen posts from Pro users that complain about not enough trees to merge with, because the free users could not merge with them.

Tree matching is different from merging.

Merge

http://help.geni.com/entries/469660-how-can-i-merge-my-tree-with-a-...

Match

http://help.geni.com/entries/20041572-how-to-use-tree-matches

LOL Jose. It is not the same as learning a price is reduced. That analogy only works for something tangible like a car or soda pop. Doesn't work for a service. And, I"m not sure how enthralled I am about having more people creating profiles only to merge them into the tree. It's complicated enough with duplicate profiles. And, thank you Erica for clearing up the Merge v. Match definition. Not sure I see solace in it, but at least I understand it better. I guess the bottom line is that it really doesn't matter much what we say at this point, the "New Geni" is a done deal. It might be best to get on with it :)