Genealogy networking site,
Geni.com has today announced they want to become a "digital scrapbook" for families. To do this, Geni.com have launched two new features, Timelines and Family News.
Geni's CEO David Sacks says, "The most important events in people's lives involve family. The benefits and workload of memorializing these events should be distributed among family members. Geni will introduce a Family Timeline that rolls up the individual timelines of family members thus creating a digital family scrapbook."
Geni users can add a new page to their profile for different events in their life, where they can add photos and comments. They can also share this page with other Geni users who attended the event - the 'scrapbook' page will then appear on that persons profile.
"Scrapbooking is a huge offline business that should move online, not only because media is now digital but also because collaboration and sharing are much easier online. Our goal is to enable family and friends to build digital scrapbooks of their lives and the lives of their family," explains Sacks.
The Family News feature (similar in look and feel to Facebook's News Feed -
see opposite) provides a single page where users can track everything going on in their family, including additions to their family tree and timelines, birthdays, photos, discussions, comments, etc which Geni does by trawling the profiles of a user's family.
According to the
press release issued today, Geni.com have implemented secure privacy settings that allow users to control who is in their Family group and which of their activity will appear in Family News.
Popular social networking site Facebook, recently came
under fire (again) for their new advertising tool Beacon and quickly did an about-turn to provide more control with their users about what information they did and did not share with friends and family.
Geni.com was a
winner of the 2007 Webware 100 Awards.