The e-mails and comments I’ve gotten over the past week or so have resurrected my resolve to make Beyond a reality. After all, I do have free time; it’s just a matter of deciding how I spend it. And while making books is all well and good, I think Beyond probably deserves a higher priority.

That said, I’m now trying to figure out just what Beyond will be. There are a few problems that need solving, particularly collaboration, visualization, and user interfaces. I think I’ll focus on those. Stretching myself too thin — like butter on too much bread — will be bad.

What do I expect to come out of this? I do hope that my work here will result in a usable web app that I can use to do my genealogy, but I still see myself more as an R&D lab. If developers want to take these ideas and run with them, I’d be ecstatic. (Assuming the ideas are good, that is. :)) And yet I’m rather interested in writing a minimalist genealogy app as well. So we’ll see what happens.

I have an idea for a way to link families together, in a more user-friendly way, but it’s still in the works and I’m at my parents’ home so I don’t have access to Photoshop right now (and I won’t use MS Paint!), so suffice it to say that it’s kind of like organizing Flickr sets — people at the bottom, drag and drop into families or whatever kinds of relationships you want. (I’m still a firm believer that the new generation of genealogy apps needs to handle non-family relationships — friends, employers, debtors, whatever.)

I feel kind of tacky asking for continued comments and e-mails, but they really do make a difference. It’s probably part of being human. :)

Technorati Tags: genealogy, family history

Posted in Beyond, Design
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