News

We’ve added a new Preferences tab to the family tree. In it, you’ll find several new options for customizing the display of your tree, including the ability to display maiden names — a popular user request. The new preferences are divided into three sections: Display Four tree layouts – Standard, Vertical, Photos Only, and Names Only Choose the number of generations to display, including an option for direct ancestors only (pedigree view) ‘Flip’ nodes over… Read the full story

We are moving our Forums and Help Center and so they will be down temporarily this afternoon.  If you are having trouble reaching them, don’t worry they’ll be back soon. If you need immediate assistance please send an email to help@geni.com.

We just released a number of enhancements to Geni: Speed Improvements: We have made a number of changes focused on increasing the speed and performance of your Geni experience. Many of our users, especially those with large trees, should notice improved performance right away.  Here are some of the changes we’ve made to make Geni faster. Tree View Display Change – When you view your tree you will now see ten generations of ancestors displayed—if… Read the full story

Today we announced that out users have created over 5 million profiles since our launch in mid-January just 5 months ago. With the combination of our growing index of names and our new ‘Search Outside Your Tree’ feature, we continue to work hard towards our goal of creating a Family Tree of the whole world. If you are interested you can read the whole press release here Discuss this story

We have added a new feature to Geni to help you find and connect with your family. You can now search for other Geni users and profiles outside your family tree.  Simply search for a name using the same search box you already use you will now see two tabs – Search results ‘In Your Tree’ and ‘Outside Your Tree’. ‘Outside Your Tree’ search results will return a list of all deceased profiles and all… Read the full story

UPDATE:  Geni should be fully operational again.  Thank you for your patience! Last night we released a number of new features to Geni.  The number of users who have responded to some of our new features have caused some performance issues with the site.  Users may continue to have performance issues with the site while we continue to improve our ability to handle the demand.  The site may even be inaccessible for short periods of… Read the full story

Staying in touch with your family just got easier with Geni’s new Inbox: there’s a new Inbox tab at the top of each page for quick access to your messages. (This tab will also display an icon when you have new messages.) There’s also a ‘Requests’ view, for invitations from family friends. Send a private, person-to-person message to anyone in your tree (and to family friends), by using the Send Message button on the profile… Read the full story

Map of My Tree You can view all of your family’s current locations and birthplaces on a global map. Use the familiar Google Maps interface to zoom and navigate around the world. Choose who you want to see on the map including anyone in your family or family friends.   Navigation Tray Get around your tree with the new tray at the bottom of the My Tree tab.  The ‘Navigate’ tab makes it easy to… Read the full story

Wednesday, June 20th, starting at 11:30pm PDT, geni.com will be offline for approximately two hours to perform routine maintenance.

Thanks to all of you who voted for Geni we have been awarded a 2007 Webware 100 award – ‘the first user-generated Web 2.0 awards program’.  You can view all of the winners here. You may also want to read the interesting analysis by Webware editor  Rafe Needleman, especially the video announcement. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to vote for us – we will keep working hard at improving Geni and earning… Read the full story

Almost three months have passed since we last gave a list of the largest Geni trees, so here is an update: #1 Tree: 13,227 profiles#2 Tree: 11,396 profiles #3 Tree: 7,546 profiles #10 Tree: 5,149 profiles #100 Tree: 1,685 profiles #200 Tree: 1,194 profiles Congrats again to all the large trees! Discuss this story

Below is a recent interview by Robert Scoble of David Sacks, founder and CEO of Geni, discussing the past, present, and future of Geni.  Enjoy! Discuss this story

We are proud to announce that Geni has been selected by the editors at CNET Webware as a finalist in the first ever “Webware 100” awards.  We were chosen from more than 4,000 user-submitted nominations.  Winners will be announced on Monday, June 18 and posted on Webware.com, a CNET site. Cast your vote. More about the Webware 100 Awards- The “Webware 100” Awards recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading… Read the full story

Following our release last week we received some great feedback from our users.  We have now released an update to Geni that addresses the following issues –Family Friends Privacy – Family Friends are not able to view your family tree or the profile of anyone else on your family tree.  Now you can also choose to hide your immediate family and your Guest Book from your family friends. Anniversaries on Calendar – As a result… Read the full story

In this May 20, 2007 blog TechCrunch discusses the new features recently released on Geni and revisits the  valuation given to Geni  two months ago at the time Charles River Ventures valued it. Click to read the Blog

Geni is a tool for understanding and staying in touch with your family.  Now Geni can also help you stay in touch with your family friends.  When you invite family friends to join your network on Geni they can view your profile and your photos.  When your friends join you on Geni you will be able to see their profile and photos as well.  You can then leave a comment in your friends’ Guest Books… Read the full story

In addition to the original ‘Tree’ and ‘List’ views we have now added four new ways to view the information in family tree: Calendar – The Family Calendar lists all of your family’s upcoming birthdays and anniversaries.  We also tell you how old the person will be on their next birthday and for anniversaries we tell you which anniversary itis (bronze, silver, gold, etc.).Map – (UPDATE: The Map feature has been temporarily disabled due to… Read the full story

In addition to Family Friends and Four New Tree Views, our new release also includes the following new and enhanced features: Photo Tagging Extended Photo Tagging – We received a lot of feedback on our photo tagging feature that we included in our last release.  We heard that you really love the feature but need to be able to tag a photo with the name of anyone in your tree.  Now you can – you… Read the full story

Geni.com is temporarily down for schedule maintenance.  We will be back soon!

Are you attending the National Genealogical Society Conference and Family History Fair in Richmond, Virginia,  May 16-19?  If you will be there and have time to chat with us please let us know by sending an email to the address listed below.  We have some Geni t-shirts that we will give to the first 15 users who will be attending the show. The Geni Team will be out in force for the Southern California Genealogy… Read the full story

The Geni Team now has a del.icio.us account. We created this account to help track the conversations about Geni around the blogosphere.  If you post something to delicious and want to call our attention to it just mark it with the tag ‘Geni’ and we will see it.  You can also add us to your delicious network. We hope this will also help publicize our great blogger friends that have helped us spread the word… Read the full story

The Technology Evangelist site has named Geni their first ‘Website of the Week‘.  We are honored by this designation and wanted to share with you the video they created – In an effort to give you even more video content we are premiering another new feature this week on TechnologyEvangelist. Website of the Week will be a video look at some new and interesting websites out there that you might not have heard of. Ed… Read the full story

Tonight we released a number of new features to Geni.  Here is an overview of our new photo features (for information on the rest of our new features read this blog post). My Photos – We have added a ‘My Photos’ tab next to ‘My Tree’ and ‘My Profile’.  This is your personal photo album and only you can see this tab.  ‘My Photos’ is a compilation of your photos and the photos on your… Read the full story

We are pleased to announce that we have released some exciting new features tonight.  We really think you will enjoy this release, which focuses on sharing photos, creating a paper version of your family tree, and more.  (For the details of our new photo features read this blog post). Printing – One of our most requested features is the ability to print your Geni family tree.  Now you can.  There is a new printer icon… Read the full story

The Geni site went down at 7pm for a short time for scheduled maintenance.  We will post updates here on the blog as they occur.  Thanks for your patience. The Geni Team

Your feedback is very important to The Geni Team.  When we first started this blog, your comments on each post were one of the best ways that we had to communicate with you, our users.  However, we have found that The Geni Forum is an even better way to communicate with each of you and for our users to carry on discussions with each other. For this reason we have decided to turn off all… Read the full story

Update 5/4/2011: The Geni team has changed significantly over the years.  For current info on the team, please visit our Geni Team page.

Tuesday, April 10, starting at 9:00pm PDT, our blog will be offline for approximately two hours to perform routine maintenance.

We just released an update to Geni and we have a few new features to tell you about: Birthday Reminders – When someone on your tree has a birthday you will now receive an email reminder.  This email will include a link that will let you write a special message that will show up in their profile with a special birthday graphic.  Make sure you enter your birthday in your profile if you want to… Read the full story

The Geni site will be down for a short time tonight at 7:30 Pacific Time for scheduled maintenance.  We will post updates here on the blog as they occur.  Thanks for your patience. The Geni Team UPDATE 9:30 PM PDT: Geni.com is back up. UPDATE 9:00 PM PDT: We are working on some final changes that should be finished soon. Thanks you for your patience.

As trees are growing larger we know that many of you have requested enhanced privacy features.  Our team has been working hard to address these issues and you will start seeing some of these features released in the coming weeks.  The privacy enhancements they are working on include:     More control over which user can see what information on your profile     The option to allow immediate family members to edit your profile…. Read the full story

Now that Geni Forum is up and running and there is a link at the bottom of every Geni page and another one on the sidebar of this page,  we’d like to ask you to direct your questions, requests and discussions there.   The Geni team monitors the Forum regularly.  Additionally many Geni users hang out there and offer solutions to questions others present.  It’s a great place to meet other Geni users, swap stories and… Read the full story

GEDCOM import and export has been one of your top requests. We’re starting with the export of GEDCOM files as an "alpha" feature: we know that GEDCOM import may be an important part of your genealogy research and we want to make sure we get it right. A few notes: this is our first step along the path to exporting your full Geni tree to your GEDCOM file. Because privacy has been one of our… Read the full story

Some of you have asked for anonymous statistics on tree sizes, so here you go: Largest Tree: 4,216 profiles 2nd Biggest: 3,358 3rd Biggest: 3,330 10th Biggest: 1,555 100th Biggest: 746 Congrats to all of you who made the Top 100!

"These applications are fairly addictive  Go try Geni, and I bet that before long, you’ve got your whole family at work on it. (I do.)" O’Reilly Radar

We’re happy to announce that the Geni Forum is open–it’s a place for users of Geni to discuss how to build (and make the most out of) their family tree.  Soon there will be a link at the footer of every Geni page but until then you can find us by clicking this link to the Geni Forum.

As you may have noticed, Geni recently launched a Help section. There’s a link to Help at the bottom of every Geni page.  Later this week we will launch Geni Forums.  We’ll announce the launch on this Blog. We’ll keep you posted on our other exciting features as they are rolled out.

We are working to allow exporting to GEDCOM files and other family tree data.  This is on our road map along with tree merging. Neither of these will be rolled out immediately as there are many considerations that must be incorporated in these features.  For instance, tree merging requires us to give you the tools necessary to resolve conflicts and eliminate redundancies in trees; also greater privacy will accompany large trees. The Geni Family is… Read the full story

Geni is pleased to announce that it has raised $10 million in additional financing from venture capital firm Charles River Ventures (CRV). George Zachary of CRV will join the board of Geni. We will use the financing to expand our product development efforts.

We’ve been reading each and every post that comes to us here at Geni and the post today that asked for more communication from the team really resonated with us. Even though we haven’t been as visible on our blog you should know that we read each and every comment that comes in.  A daily wrap up is sent out to the whole team to keep them aware of what everyone is requesting, problems they… Read the full story

The Geni site is back up!

We’ve taken the Geni site down for a short time to make some improvements. It’ll be back as soon as the improvements and maintenance are completed.  Thanks for your patience. The Geni Team

We’ve added the ability for you to keep track of your Geni invitations and to resend them when you want to send a reminder or nudge.  To view your invitations go to the top of your Geni page and select the ‘invite’ link.  Next select the ‘View your Invitation History’ link which allows you to view the history of invitations sent by you or by other family members.

Check out Dave Kaufman’s Techlife Blog today: Geni – So easy your mom can do it. Really!

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just completed our first major release since we launched just over a month ago. If you return to Geni now, you’ll see the following new features and fixes: Family Tree Easier removal of mistakenly-added family members, via the "x" icon More arrows for adding parents of relatives International keyboard layout support A new Edit Info dialog box, with frequently edited data on first tab A new field for display… Read the full story

Notice: Geni will be unavailable tonight from 7:00 PM to approximately 8:00 PM for scheduled maintenance. We’ll keep you posted here. UPDATE: It’s taking a little longer than we thought, but our upgrades are proceding in the order we planned. Thanks for being patient!

We’ve received a deluge of emails since the Wall Street Journal article came out last week, a lot of these over the weekend–this has resulted in the largest backlog of emails ever. Since we read each and every one of the emails we receive, we ask that, if you have sent us an email, you: Please do not resend the question or comment as this slows down the process of responding to others Try the… Read the full story

If you saw us in the Wall Street Journal, or are visiting us from WSJ.com, thank you and welcome to Geni! Please feel free to comment on this blog post with any questions or suggestions you have, and we’ll do our best to answer them here. A little background here: Geni was featured in the Thursday, February 15th Issue of the Wall Street Journal. You can find the article on the front page of the… Read the full story

Since we began sending out the "Your Family Tree Is Growing" emails we’ve received a tremendous reponse–this has resulted in increased traffic and is slowing down the Geni site.  The Geni Team is working as hard and fast as it can to address this problem.   Thanks for using Geni.

"…Geni.com is interesting because it’s a site that organizes your family tree. That’s a value-add that other social networks don’t provide…" Bambi Francisco’s Blog