Looking Forward to 2011

Yesterday we took a look back at Geni in 2010.  Today we’d like to share our vision for the coming year.

Geni’s mission is to create a shared family tree of the world. We continue to believe that getting as many people as possible to work together on a common tree is the best way to achieve this goal. We are committed to developing the best collaborative genealogy platform to enable this crowd-sourced world family tree. As we enter 2011, we are focusing on enhancing two features that we believe will take our collaborative genealogy platform to the next level: Sources and Revisions.

Sources

Sources are an essential part of genealogy. Without proper sourcing, genealogy is not much more than speculation and wishful thinking. Sources are even more important in a collaborative environment, where they can be used to help users work through differences in merged trees.

In 2010 we released the first version of our sources feature, which lets users support profile facts with a citation and a document. We have a number of enhancements to documents and sources planned for 2011, some of which are already under development.

Planned enhancements include:

• Ability to source relationships and add citations within text fields
• Advanced Document search
• A common repository of public documents
• Enhanced visibility and usability for documents and sources

The goal is to encourage users to source as much data as possible in the tree, and to make it easy for users to use sources when merging profiles and resolving disputes.

Revisions

Revisions are vital in a collaborative environment such as Geni. By revisions, we mean a way to view, track, and undo changes, such as profile or tree edits.

In 2010 we released some basic revision tools, including the ability to:

• View a list of revisions for a tree or profile
• Follow profiles to track changes
• View and revert changes to descriptions fields on people, project, and surname pages

In the coming months we are going to build on this foundation with a number of enhancements. The goal is to let you view, track, and undo virtually any change across the site. This includes an oft requested feature – the ability to undo merges.

And much more…

Sources and revisions are vital tools necessary to achieve our mission, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t working on other cool stuff.  With the release of our API, we anticipate some great third party tools and some action in the mobile space.  We also have some ideas for additional features that will compliment sourcing and projects, and we’re constantly working with our power users to determine what will be the next great feature on Geni.

We’re committed to making 2011 a greater success than 2010 has been, and that’s not an easy challenge.  To end the year, we once again want to thank all of our wonderful users for your help in making Geni the best genealogy community on the web.

The Geni staff wishes you a safe and happy New Year’s Eve!