The following news release was posted on Marketwire today. The changes at Geni.com, with the addition of the subscription programs, have not been without controversy.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA–(Marketwire – Sep 13, 2011) – Geni, the collaborative family history community home to the largest, most accurate “World Family Tree,” today debuted its Geni Plus family tree research service. Designed for casual genealogists who want to collaborate with others on their family tree, Geni Plus is an enhancement to its free service tier and is available today for $4.95/month.
Before today, Geni offered only Basic (free) service and Pro ($12.95/month) membership tiers. Recent changes to these services, aimed to increase the collaboration and accuracy of the World Family Tree, and the resulting community feedback highlighted the need for a service designed for the more active social genealogist conducting research on their family tree.
“Our vision has always been focused on fostering a strong community of casual and expert genealogists who will work together to build one connected world family tree that includes a profile for every person who’s ever lived,” said Noah Tutak, Geni CEO. “We recognize that some people are more interested in sharing their personal family trees with their relatives than building the world family tree. The new Geni Plus is designed to give these members more power to build their personal family trees while discovering some of the benefits of working with others on their family history.”
Geni Plus offers benefits in addition to those found in the basic service, including:
- No limit on number of relatives one can add to their family tree
- Send unlimited virtual birthday and anniversary gifts to family and friends
- Discover relationships to distant relatives, celebrities and historical figures
- Export a GEDCOM file for any profile one can view on Geni (up to 100,000 records)
- Access to Geni’s expert customer service staff
- An ad free experience
Those choosing to use the free Geni Basic service can start creating their family tree by creating profiles for close relatives, inviting family and friends to join their family tree and contribute, receive event reminders for family birthdays and anniversaries, upload and share unlimited photos, videos and documents and access community features such as discussion groups and genealogy projects. While free members do not have access to live customer service help, they can use Geni’s robust self-help tools to quickly find solutions to common problems and ask for help from others in the Geni community.
Geni Pro provides serious genealogists the power to instantly discover new relatives while browsing, merge with other trees to quickly grow their family tree, search more than 100 million genealogy profiles for potential relatives, create/edit public profiles, and connect to the World Family tree of more than 58 million profiles.
About Geni, Inc.
Geni is an online community of casual and expert genealogists working together to create a single World Family Tree. Members can invite relatives to help them build their family tree with no limit to the number of people, documents, photos or videos added. They can then discover how they are related to celebrities, historical figures and other members of the World Family Tree. Privately held and based in Los Angeles, Geni’s financial backers include Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures. It was founded by David Sacks, the original chief operating officer of PayPal and founder of Yammer, Inc.
There are serious problems with the information on this site. They allow contributors to restrict access to files to correct and bring them up to date. Although they have a process of letting you think you are emailing the file manager, the file managers do not respond.
I found some information to be incorrect and incomplete. Links are not allowed to those managers who restrict access to the files.
Doug