headquarters los angeles california usa founder s david o. sacks alan braverman amos elliston president gilad japhet general manager michael stangel usa industry genealogy social networking services parent myheritage website www.geni.com alexa rank 7 595 may 2015 update 1 geni is a commercial genealogy and social networking website owned by israeli private company myheritage . launched on january 16 2007 the web 2.0 company stated that it aimed to create a family tree of the world . 2 3 while family profiles are private 4 geni s mission is to create a shared family tree of common ancestors . by combining research into a single tree that users work on together users can focus on verifying information and on new avenues of research rather than spending time duplicating research that others have already done . over 98.6 million profiles were created on geni by over 5.8 million users as of december 2010 . 5 6 geni was the original parent company of enterprise messaging service yammer 7 which became part of microsoft on july 19 2012 . 8 in november 2012 geni was acquired by myheritage . 9 contents 1 investors 2 revenue model 3 features 3.1 family tree awards 3.2 discussion forums and projects 3.3 notifications 3.4 gedcom 3.5 merging trees 4 world family tree 5 popular profiles 6 references 7 external links investors edit the founders fund a private venture capital firm invested more than 1 million . 10 charles river ventures a private venture capital firm has also invested us 10 million . 11 revenue model edit basic free members can build a tree offering an unlimited number of profiles basic support merging of trees linking of duplicates and uploading up to 1gb of media . 9 12 the pro subscription removes the media upload restrictions and adds premium support enhanced searching and tree matching which identifies duplicate trees that could be merged . 12 features edit geni.com website at the website users enter names and email addresses of their parents siblings and other relatives as well as profiles with various fields of biographical information about themselves and their relatives . from there users may graphically manipulate sections of their connections network to create a complete personal family tree . 10 the service uses the contact information to invite additional members to join and builds a comprehensive social network database from the information collectively entered by members . for now users may only see information belonging to themselves and to people in their immediate network who have given them permission . 13 family tree awards edit members of each family are ranked by the number of contributions they make to the family tree and are given awards within the family tree itself . contributions categories include number of profiles added number of invitations made photos uploaded videos uploaded etc. the top 13 people in each category receive awards . this feature urges users to generate more contact and to compete with each other . discussion forums and projects edit each family tree features a family discussion forum where messages can be posted and responses made . it can be used as such a digest for family news . there are also public discussions profile specific discussions and project discussions . projects are special interest groups organized around historical topics e.g. world war one casualties immigration patterns e.g. norwegian american occupations e.g. librarians place names e.g. christ church college oxford university or any other subject of general interest that will foster social discussion among members as well as providing a portal to which biographical profiles may be linked . notifications edit each person who has linked to their family tree via their email address can elect to be notified about various activities on the tree such as when new people are added if any pictures are uploaded when someone posts a message on the discussion forum or someone has a birthday etc. notification frequency options include none instant daily and weekly . gedcom edit while geni has the ability to allow users to import their family history using the gedcom format 14 this facility has been temporarily update disabled for almost 4 years . geni found it was duplicating thousands of existing profiles without adding much or any new information . they plan to re enable gedcom imports once they rewrite the importer to take the close family profiles and screen out the rest . merging trees edit around august 2008 geni facilitated the ability to merge family trees where they overlapped via common ancestors or living relatives . individual privacy is maintained by settings that allow tree members beyond a selectable distance of relationship to only see limited information about a person such as their name and relationship to them . world family tree edit the rate at which these extended trees grow tends to increase as the trees become larger . some extended trees or forests have snowballed . one in particular has become significantly larger than any other . as of january 27 2009 it contained 7.7 million profiles and was growing at the rate of approximately 2 million profiles per month . on july 11 2009 it surpassed 20 million profiles on august 16 2009 it crossed 23 million profiles . at the end of february 2010 it had passed 35 million profiles by the end of the year 2010 it was just short of 50 million . in december 2012 the big tree was at 66 million profiles . 15 16 in october 2014 the big tree was at 80 million profiles in april 2015 it was at 91 million profiles . 16 on january 26 2016 geni announced that the world family tree had surpassed 100 million profiles . 17 by april 30 2016 it had reached 102 890 389 profiles . the large tree is colloquially referred to by many geni genealogists monitoring this phenomenon as the big tree or the world family tree . 16 genealogists can walk the tree from one end to the other or up toward the past and then back down to the present on another line . within this tree people are either connected by bloodlines or through marriage . bloodlines which can include adoptions and illegitimacy either acknowledged or unacknowledged are represented by names in blue ; marriage connections are represented by names having a new colour for each marriage . straight blue line relationships are those that have a high likelihood of shared dna although dna connections can not be proven by genealogy only by dna tests . popular profiles edit geni features a section in which one can view the top profiles on the website . the top profiles include u.s. presidents athletes and other famous people such as inventors or historians . examples george washington babe ruth thomas edison and benjamin franklin . geni users can find out if and how they are related to such persons via their existing connections in the world family tree . there are also portals at geni which feature notable individuals grouped by profession life events location and so forth and in these portals notability in geni consists of a link to the person s biography at wikipedia . thus notability at wikipedia is a standard by which notability at geni may be vetted . an example of this is geni s jewish celebrity birthday calendar a project which includes people with a wikipedia page or an entry in the jewish encyclopedia or jewish women s archive . references edit geni.com site overview . retrieved 1 may 2015 . arrington michael 2007 01 12 . paypal pulp fiction and geni . techcrunch . retrieved 2007 01 20 . geni.com launches venture backed family tree site . socaltech.com . 2007 01 16 . retrieved 2007 01 20 . geni privacy . geni . the big tree approaching 50 million profiles . interview with david sacks geni and yammer . socaltech.com . 2008 09 30 . retrieved 2008 11 02 . yammer gets top prize at tech conference . socaltech.com . 2008 09 11 . retrieved 2008 09 26 . microsoft completes yammer buy out social network joins the office . engadget.com . july 19 2012 . retrieved august 26 2012 . a b geni is joining the myheritage family . geni . a b marshall matt 2007 01 16 . geni aims to build family tree for whole world . venture beat . retrieved 2007 01 20 . arrington michael 2007 03 05 . 100 million valuation for geni . techcrunch . retrieved 2007 03 05 . a b what are the different types of geni memberships . geni.com . september 24 2013 . retrieved 11 march 2014 . butler phil 2007 01 17 . geni links in a bottle . profy.com . retrieved 2007 01 20 . eastman dick 2008 05 12 . geni adds gedcom import . eastman s online genealogy newsletter . retrieved 2008 05 15 . our family is growing . geni.com . 5 december 2012 . retrieved 5 december 2012 . a b c world family tree geni s world family tree surpasses 100 million profiles external links edit company website v t e genealogy software open source desktop non web family.show genealogyj gramps lifelines web based geneotree geneweb humo gen phpgedview webtrees freeware desktop non web ahnenblatt ancestral quest basics ancestry family tree builder free ver . legacy family tree standard ed . personal ancestral file pc rootsmagic essentials web based genealone lite retail desktop non web ancestral quest brother s keeper family historian family tree builder premium ver . family tree maker genbox family history genopro kith and kin pro legacy family tree deluxe ed . geditcom macfamilytree personal ancestral file mac os reunion rootsmagic sukujutut the master genealogist treedraw web based genealone the next generation of genealogy sitebuilding software as a service saas free web based familypedia familysearch rodovid werelate.org retail web based familytreedna.com ancestry.com 23andme . com findmypast genealone.net geneanet genes reunited geni.com mocavo.com myheritage general comparison of genealogy software comparison of web based genealogy software family tree mapping gedcom genealogy websites category v t e paypal mafia individuals peter thiel reid hoffman max levchin ken howery luke nosek elon musk steve chen keith rabois chad hurley roelof botha jawed karim yishan wong eric m. jackson david o. sacks premal shah russel simmons jeremy stoppelman companies founded or co founded paypal linkedin youtube slide.com yelp geni.com yammer spacex tesla motors palantir technologies kiva.org investments friendster facebook powerset vator six apart zynga ironport flickr digg grockit ooma quantcast rapleaf smartdrive systems transferwise ping.fm nanosolar knewton kongregate last.fm tokbox xoom joost funds the founders fund clarium capital greylock partners sequoia capital other the paypal wars thank you for smoking the stanford review retrieved from https en.wikipedia.org w index.php title geni.com & oldid 743512304 categories community websitescompanies based in los angelesgenealogy websitessocial networking servicesinternet properties established in 2007hidden categories articles containing potentially dated statements from before 1990all 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