One of my friends mentioned today that she’d like a Google Docs for genealogy — you know, like a spreadsheet or a document but instead it would be a pedigree. And I thought of Beyond. And I thought, “Gee, I wish I had time and energy to do it.” Because still, nobody’s done it — not done right, at any rate. And when it is done right, it’ll be big. Huge. Phenomenal. Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies out there.

I don’t think I’ll be the one to pull it off, though. I’m still rather burned out from programming and I don’t see myself starting a massive project like this anytime soon. But I do plan to continue writing on here occasionally, and I hope with all my heart that someone will take the cream of the crop of these ideas here and create something truly beautiful — the Google Docs or Flickr of the genealogy world. I want to be wowed. I want to be thunderstruck. I want to be moved to tears. (Well, perhaps I’m overdramatizing a bit here, but we’ve still got a long way to go.)

I just got an e-mail about how Geni now has what they call family friends. “Make Geni your all-inclusive network for staying in touch with all the people you care about,” they say.

That’s great, I suppose, but my first thought when I read that was, “There’s no way they’re going to be able to compete with Facebook.” As of Tuesday there are 30 million people on Facebook. That’s a juggernaut.

And then my second thought was, “Wait a second. Facebook just launched their application API a few weeks ago.” Now, I haven’t looked into how extensive the API is, so I don’t know how much one could do with it, but Facebook could definitely be the foundation for genealogy social networking — it’s been around long enough, it’s huge, you can already share photos and videos and calendar events and birthdays, and it has an application API that third-party developers can build on. And even though it is massive, it still has a clean, smooth feel to it, unlike many other sites.

A cursory search through the Facebook application directory shows nothing for “genealogy” and only two for “family,” one of which is a fraternity/sorority genealogy. Close, but no cigar. :)

Security would be an issue, of course, but overall Facebook has very good privacy control — you can set it to be whatever you want. I can’t think of many other disadvantages other than that the content frame is relatively small (compared to the full browser width), but I have a feeling that’s actually a good thing. Constraints foster creativity. And if there’s not much room, it’s hard for it to get cluttered. (Not impossible, though. :))

What would such a genealogy application look like? It could either be a full-blown app in itself, or it could pull in data from an external site (the way Facebook imports blog feeds for you). The former is more preferable than the latter, I’d think, but I’m not sure how much data you can store in the Facebook databases.

Interface-wise, there’s not a whole lot of room for a horizontal family tree, but if you limited it to three generations you ought to be fine. And of course there’d need to be a search. Each person’s name would link to a “profile” for them, similar in feel to a normal Facebook user’s profile but with obvious differences. (Similar in that you could rearrange blocks however you want, and tag them in photos and such.) If the person on your tree also happens to be on Facebook, then it would link to their real profile instead. And you would absolutely have to be able to set controls on how much of this is viewable and by whom, particularly with living people. (It’d be nice to have parts of the profile visible to others and parts not, the way you can do with your own profile.) You’d also want to be able to group other Facebook users together and give them access as a group (”Immediate family,” “extended family,” that sort of thing).

And ideally you’d be able to import/export GEDCOM. :)

Again, I’m not sure how much of this is possible, but it’s good to think out loud without worrying about what is and isn’t possible, because half the time the boundary between the two is soft to the touch.

Thoughts?

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