I finally started an account over at Geni, and I'm officially addicted. Geni is a social genealogy and family tree site. I started by adding a few relatives and invited my husband to join to add his. Alex was addicted within minutes, adding his family and inviting more people to add to our family tree. I was messing around with it today, adding more family and pictures, and also inviting my own family members to join. My sister accepted an invitation earlier today.
I've sort of dubbed myself the family historian, although I tend to not have the time to completely devote to this task. I am interested in gathering our pictures, family stories, and history though. When my father moved to Las Vegas I quickly volunteered to take the family pictures off his hands, in hopes to someday organize them (although it is likely they will continue to stay in the box). A good part of my father's side of the family is traced back pretty far, but I'm still interested in discovering as much as I can for myself. Since my mother is from Germany, tracing my history on that side would be more difficult, but I also think interesting since I know very little of that side of the family.
I'm grateful for an online application like Geni, especially when you can add the power of social networking to it. What really struck me was a comment my husband said to me a few days ago. Alex doesn't get excited about web 2.0 and social networking applications like I do, but he mentioned that this is finally something he can see as a useful approach to online social applications. It does kind of make sense, each member of your family could potentially add a different perspective to your family history that one person could never consider.
One big thing that I would like to add to the Geni wishlist is integration with Flickr or other outside photo applications. Most of the pictures I added today were already on my Flickr account; it would've been nice to pull those off of Flickr instead of trying to search my computer for them. It looks like GEDCOM export is coming soon, though.
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