Genealogists flock to innovative family research tools.
LOS ANGELES, January 11, 2011 —Geni, the world leader in collaborative genealogy, announces that its genealogy database has exceeded 100 million profiles. Just a week ago the site revealed that its single World Family Tree (called the Big Tree) reached 50 million connected profiles. This tremendous growth has been fueled by the release of a suite of collaboration tools that have been embraced by users, and expanded upon in the past year.
“We knew that the community wanted tools to make collaboration easier, but we didn’t realize the amount of impact the tools would have. Our efforts for the past year will continue to pay dividends in 2011 as we release more sophisticated tools to aid our community’s research efforts,” said Geni’s President Noah Tutak.
Geni has experienced a tremendous growth phase by dedicating resources to the development of many features that empower the Geni community to solve the problem of genealogy: forming a single family tree of the world. Geni’s significant growth is a result of several factors:
– Features introduced on Geni in 2010 have created a Wikipedia-style environment for research and collaboration.
– Geni is a free service with a premium model, meaning anyone can use the vast majority of the features on the site without a barrier-to-entry, including profile merging and search capabilities for documents, discussions and more than a hundred million profiles.
– The release of an API that allows the automation of many collaborative tasks.
– Implementation of tr8n, an open source translation tool that Geni developed to crowd source the site’s translation efforts.
With the release of the API, Geni has become a vast information source for third parties ranging from international genealogical societies to researchers at MIT. As the API functionality expands and the collaboration efforts grow, Geni is positioned to become a key resource for historians, anthropologists, and genealogy experts around the globe.
About Geni, Inc.
Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by inviting the world to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service at Geni.com, users add and invite their relatives to join their family tree, which Geni compares to other trees. Matching trees are then merged into the single world family tree, which currently contains nearly 50 million living users and their ancestors. Pay services include enhanced research tools as well as keepsake products created from family tree data. Geni welcomes casual genealogists and experts who wish to discover new relatives and stay in touch with family. Geni is privately held and based in Los Angeles, California.