Catching the Geni that’s out of the bottle: introducing FamilyLink
Filed under: Europe, Families, Family Tree Projects, Genealogy, History, Online Content, Provo Labs Companies, Social Networking Watch, Viral Marketing, World Vital Records
On January 16th, an amazing, innovative, well-financed company (especially now, after raising $10 million!) launched a brilliant, web 2.0 based online family tree building tool called Geni..
After getting TechCrunched more than once, Geni caught the fancy of many bloggers and started spreading through word of mouth, but more powerfully, its innately viral application started attracting thousands of users very quickly. (Geni’s Alexa chart doesn’t look great, but Geni’s Quantcast chart looks better. No “addicts”, however, which comprise 38% of Ancestry’s traffic.)
I was both thrilled and disappointed. You see, I want interest in family history to spread all over the world. The family is fundamentally the most important unit in society, and modern societies with the ever weakening family are bring hosts of problems that will never be solved by government, which relies on force to tax people and create policy. The Old Testament ends with two haunting verses: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to the fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” (Malachi 4:5-6).
Getting families to pay more attention to each other is important not only to those who believe in the Old Testament. Phillip Longman, author of “The Empty Cradle” which decries the falling birthrates in industrialized countries from an economic standpoint ends his book with these powerful words: ” If free societies have a future, it will be because they figure out or stumble upon a way to restore the value of children to their parents, and of parents to each other.”
Even the Soviet Union, when its birth rates kept declining, spoke out. Andrei Kirilenko, the ideology chief, said at a Kremlin rally in 1979, “Our common responsibility for the country’s future requires us to strengthen the family, to elevate the prestige of motherhood and to increase the demands made on the parents as to how their children are growing up.” Note how the language implies the power of government (which is always coercive) to get parents to do better. (Cited by Longman)
So I was thrilled by the launch of Geni, the best free online family tree building tool since MyFamily.com/Ancestry.com launched its free online family tree building tool back in 1999, and excited by the new attention that was being given to the family history category by the blogosphere. The first time ever really, since Ancestry.com/MyFamily.com are rather mature web sites and The Generations Network, which owns both of them, is more in its “monetization phase” than in a “build the market” phase. The blogosphere has never gotten all that excited about what Ancestry.com does and since MyFamily.com hasn’t been free since 2001, it has experienced “negative population growth.”
(Speaking of negative population growth, no less a thinker than Peter Drucker said that negative population growth is the single biggest issue facing civilization today. So on my recent trip to Europe it was very interesting to read “The Empty Cradle” completely and to consider the factors there that are leading to fewer children. Italy used to have a million births a year–now it’s 500,000.)
Not that Geni or MyFamily.com or any site that connects families is going to increase the worldwide birth rate. We’ll leave that job to matchmaking sites like eHarmony.com.
The CEO of eHarmony.com spoke at Stanford on Valentine’s Day, and casually pointed out that on any given day, 200 marriages occur where the people met on eHarmony, and that by the end of this year, there will have been 100,000 babies born to couples married because of eHarmony. No wonder he says doing any other job seems trivial compared to this most-satisfying company. Maybe the solution to worldwide negative population growth is to make sure eHarmony rolls out worldwide as quickly and inexpensively as possible!
Okay, so back to Geni. I was disappointed by Geni’s appearance because I had decided late last year to stop running my Provo Labs incubator, and start focusing on just one company, and turn that company into a raging success. I had chosen to focus on World Vital Records, along with the very talented team that is already there, for many reasons, one being that we felt we could be the first genealogy company to launch a social network for family history, and social networks are generally the fastest growth web sites today.
We were planning to do something entirely different than what family history web sites have done before, and we still are. But Geni’s launch has caused us to change our time table for many of our product features.
To be honest, my disappointment has entirely faded. It’s been swallowed up by an overwhelming feeling of excitement about family history sweeping the world, about families actually using technology to connect, rather than to disintegrate. The Geni launch, as well as all the great moves that Ancestry.com is doing (like launching international sites, kicking off its first-ever integrated advertising campaign — worth $10 million — to boost interest in the brand) and the newly formed alliance between werelate.org (see what Dick Eastman said about werelate.org last June) and the Allen County Public Library, the second largest family history library in the country — all of these things add to the level of excitement.
Anyway, the big question is can another family history social network take off? Can anyone catch Geni?
I’m not going to answer that question, because I simply can’t predict it. And it really doesn’t matter. Geni provides a great service to people who want to build their first family tree and to invite family members to collaborate on it. Geni is obviously great at listening to customers (Geni blog, Geni forum) and at responding to their requests quickly.
And of course Ancestry would certainly dispute the need to “catch Geni” in the first place. Ancestry is loudly defending its leadership position in this space. They have made it clear through recent press announcements that the Ancestry family tree software is attracting millions of records, photos, and more. And with revenues of $150 million per year, they have a very good chance to defend their leadership position.
So where does World Vital Records stand? How we can think that we have a chance to compete in this venture-capital driven world of online genealogy?
The key for us is to attract millions of users to our new free social network for family history which we call FamilyLink. We are some days away from our beta launch, and we can hardly wait. Our site will offer unique and valuable help to every serious family history researcher, and it will nicely coexist with all of the TGN web sites as well as Geni.com.
Our team is cautiously optimistic about our initial launch, and wildly enthusiastic about the long-term potential that we have to provide value to family historians worldwide. And we believe that by adding new databases every day to our World Vital Records web site, that our revenue will be able to keep up with our expenses. It won’t be cheap to run FamilyLink. But World Vital Records continues to generate record revenue each month and we are getting ever closer to being a sustainable business.
Thanks to the GEDCOM standard for data exchange, anyone who downloads a family tree from familysearch.org or Ancestry.com or Geni will be able to import their family data into virtually any genealogy software program or upload it to sites that accept gedcom uploads. And based on Geni’s March 15th blog post, any gedcom upload site that gets 100 uploads of family trees with at least 1,000 names in them, will end up with bigger trees than Geni has right now.
Of course, the magic in Geni is not in the size of its trees, but in its virality. Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn says he keeps a list of 12 people in the world who truly understand viral marketing (and he is one of the 12.) I wonder if anyone at Geni is on that list. Probably so, given the common PayPal connections. I doubt that anyone from TGN is on his list. But I hope that FamilyLink might convince him to add one more name to this list…and soon.
You can visit FamilyLink today and sign up for the beta. We’ll let you know when it is available. It won’t be long.
Family history is a global phenomenon
In December our web analytics showed that Worldvitalrecords.com had visitors from 117 countries. Now we are up to 141 countries. The web is truly a global phenomenon. So is family history. World Vital Records is helping people all over the world find their ancestors. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements in the coming months.
I remember a few years ago a Roper Starch Worldwide survey found that “protecting the family” was the key driving value in the lives of most consumers from most countries. In fact, I believe it was ranked #1 in 22 of the 35 countries that were surveyed.
“Respecting your elders” was also in the top 5 values. These values were ranked ahead of health, money, and other things that we normally think of as driving consumer behaviors. (Now of course our values and our behaviors are not necessarily always in sync!)
The family still is the most fundamental unit of society, even though 44% of adult Americans are single (I saw that factoid on the news the other day), they all still belong to at least one family. Everyone is connected. If families ties can become stronger, society benefits a great deal, as families take more responsibility for each other’s well-being.
Changing my blog topic
In an effort to focus my time and attention on one company for the next few years, I have decided to change the title of my blog from Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur to Paul Allen: Internet Genealogy.
I have been blogging for more than 3 years. I think I have made about 750 posts during that time, many of them about internet marketing, entrepreneurship, angel investing, the success of Google and other popular web sites, and other such topics.
Someday I’ll probably write a book for entrepreneurs. And someday I’ll probably change the focus of my blog back to entrepreneurship.
But if all my readers will forgive me, the primary topic of my future blog posts will be online genealogy.
I’m feeling wonderfully about my decision to focus on one thing, especially because it’s the thing I love the most.
When I attended CES this week (Monday to Wednesday), everything I saw, heard, or read, was processed through the filter of “how does this relate to family history,” or “how does this fit into our vision of connecting families?”
I had this same experience from 1996-2002 when I started Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com with my friend Dan Taggart. During those bubble years I had extraordinary amounts of energy, I didn’t want to sleep, I was driven like never before. I know my friend Dan Lynch had a similar experience when he joined MyFamily.com. There was something truly special about this company and this company’s mission.
But things changed, and all of our founding team left the company over the years. I left in February 2002, and out of respect to all my friends and investors there, didn’t do anything in family history for the next few years. But enough time has passed, and the time is right to refocus all my energy and resources on this wonderful mission: of connecting families.
I think the simplest way to describe the mission of WorldVitalRecords.com is “to bless all the families of the earth.” (See Genesis 12:3 if you are interested in a biblical reference where Abraham was given a promise that he and his seed would provide such a blessing.)
I’m certainly not claiming any inheritance of this promise, although as an amateur genealogist and as one who loved math in my early years, I’m pretty confident that the vast majority of people on earth today are descendants of Abraham.
Modern civilization and technology has tended to break down families and disconnect the generations. We have become so industrialized, so mobile, so independent.
My hope is that WVR can enable families to use technology to connect, communicate, share, preserve, and grow closer together. I’ve never been involved in a more fulfilling cause than when we pursued this same mission at MyFamily.com, and now we’re starting over. At the same time, The Generations Network (the new name of MyFamily.com) is doing wonderful things, and I’ll be cheering them on as they continue to help families around the world.
As far as mission goes, I see WVR as being on the same team as TGN. They have 800+ employees that are trying to help families connect and share. And we have 8.
I think that will change as we grow. We may be 1% of their size right now, and have 1% of the amount of data they have on their site today. But I think the time will come when we will be 10% their size and have 10% as much data. And who knows where it will go from there?
Competition will be good for this industry, and will spur more innovation and wider adoption. More families of the earth will be blessed if more companies focus on providing content, tools, and services that help them.
I want to apologize to hundreds of entrepreneurs in advance who will not appreciate my change of blog topic and will continue to email me and ask me for advice or guidance as they start their ventures. I’m going to have to turn down most of these requests for help, until World Vital Records is executing on all cylinders and I can take a breath.
But I want to welcome all my new readers who love genealogy and family history.
I invite you to comment freely on this blog and email me with your ideas and advice. Let’s create something really significant together. It feels great to be back with you. Thanks for the notes of encouragement and the ideas you’ve been sending me and the team already.
Healthy Marriages
In Provo, there are a lot of social entrepreneurs that are trying to find ways to use technology to connect and strengthen families. One of the new companies that just joined Provo Labs Academy is HealthyMarriage.org. The founder, Aaron Larson, asked me if I would spread the word about the free pamphlets his company offers to help marriages become or stay healthy, so here goes:
Do you want to make a significant impact for good in the world today?
Then help strengthen the keystone of society. On average children,
women, men and communities do better on EVERY SINGLE positive social
outcome, such as health, safety, financial, emotional, etc., when a
couple forms and sustains a healthy marriage.The National Healthy Marriage Institute’s goal is to help strengthen
five million marriages by the end of this year.We have created the Healthy Marriage Pamphlet Series to help accomplish
this goal. Researchers have found written materials to be a very
effective method of teaching the information couples can use to
strengthen their marriages. To view and download these pamphlets at no
charge visit http://www.healthymarriage.org/pamphletseries.htmYou can play a part in strengthening five million marriages this year by
1. Printing these pamphlets and distributing them to friends, family,
churches, schools, etc.2. Forwarding this e-mail to friends and family.
With your help millions of children, women, men and communities can access the benefits associated with healthy marriages.
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