A friend of mine has a client who’s interested in paying a programmer to put together a genealogy website ala Beyond (as described in these blog posts). I’m too busy with other projects, however, and so I thought I’d cast out the net and see if any of y’all are interested.

Spec-wise, the client wants a web app where users can upload their PAF/GEDCOM files and collaborate. They also want it to be able to generate a number of different charts. (I’m sure there are probably a few other things they want, but these seem to be the core, driving necessities.) Timeframe is 4-6 months and the salary is negotiable (based on experience — and of course you’ll need to be quite experienced since this isn’t a kiddy project). Beyond that, and I say this in all humility :), you’ll need to resonate with a lot of the ideas here on this blog. (In other words, they’re looking for something like Beyond.) It would help if you live in or near Salt Lake City, Utah, but that’s not an absolute necessity.

So, if you’re interested, send me an e-mail (my address is in the sidebar) and I’ll pass your contact information on to them. I’m not really affiliated with them and so I can’t answer any questions beyond what I’ve said here, but I hope somebody’s interested and ends up writing a really cool web app. :)

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?

Technorati Tags: Geni, Facebook, genealogy

A couple of weeks ago I came across Family Wheel, Buck DeFore’s ActionScript-based genealogy app:

You can read more about it on the project page. Quite an interesting visualization technique (meaning, as the main “pedigree” of the app; circle charts have been around for ages, but they’ve always been something you printed, not something you worked on directly). The app is fairly simple, too, which is nice.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, family history, Family Wheel

I meant to blog about this several days ago — it was announced this past Wednesday — but I had a paper due. ~sigh~ :)

Anyway, FamilySearch Labs has announced their smart pedigree viewer. In a nutshell, it’s a Flash-based pedigree chart. Here are my thoughts on it:

As for general impressions, I really, really like it. It’s smooth, intuitive, and fun. I’ve been waiting a long time to get a bird’s-eye view of my family tree, let me tell you, so this is like Christmas. :) You can zoom in and out (both through the control in the upper left and through the scroll wheel on your mouse) and pan around very nicely. If you hover over a family (being the box which holds a husband and wife), it highlights the line from that family down to you, and highlights all their ancestors as far as the lines go. It’s a nice way to see how the lines relate to each other. You can also print the pedigree out (and it seemed to work fairly well for me).

This isn’t quite as important, but I love the color scheme of the top banner. Very pretty. It makes me happy. :) The graphic design is excellent.

Possible changes:

1. It’d be nice to use vector-based images for the male/female icons instead of bitmaps, since they look quite pixelated when you zoom in close.

2. If you happen to be over a family and click the mouse button to pan, when you release the button it’ll expand the box for that family when you let go. It seems like it ought to discard the expand event if the user ends up panning. (It probably needs to use a small threshold of movement to cover those cases where they accidentally move the mouse a little bit while clicking, but it wouldn’t need to be that large, methinks.)

3. It’d be nice if you could switch the expanded data between a) birth/death for the husband and wife and b) a list of their children with birth years. (I imagine a clickable icon in the upper right letting you toggle.) In fact, it might not be a bad idea to have several “modes” for the expanded box — birth/death info, children, pictures, timeline (sparkline, methinks), visual representation of how much information you have on them, which temple work has been done, etc. But it also might be a bad idea. :)

All told, I’m very pleased with this new viewer and look forward to what else will come out of the FS Labs.

[Cross-posted on the BeyondGen list as well. This reiterates a number of thoughts I’ve already written about on here, along with a number of new ones.]

Collaboration is key

This seems obvious, but it’s worth stating if only because it changes a lot of the dynamics of genealogy software. Instead of a single, isolated researcher working primarily on data with occasional GEDCOMs sent out and merged in, the new genealogy world has to be *connected*. Researchers should be sharing notes, resources, advice, experience, and anything else that helps move the work along. No one is an island. There’s a goldmine of research out there, and the more connected people are, the less work will have to be duplicated and the more advances we’ll make.

I don’t think this means that anyone has to give up their own personal copy of the data, but instead means that my filing cabinet turns into a node on a network, with interchange of data and ideas flying back and forth all the time. Through all of this collaboration, communities will form, and the resulting collective community knowledge will be immensely useful. There are groups that have already formed — RootsWeb, mailing lists, and so on — but there needs to be more of it, and more research tools.

(As far as community knowledge goes, there’s the Genealogy wikibook, WeRelate.org, and WikiTree.org as wikified examples. I think wikis are a great way to harness it, but other models will also work well, each supplementing the rest. There’s been some discussion about the possibility of using a wiki format to store each person’s/family’s data, for ultimate flexibility. Thoughts?)

With multi-user systems, you’d also want invites (ala Gmail), privacy controls (Flickr has a good, simple model — family, friends, and everyone else), change histories (Wikipedia), and so on.

Know what’s out there

There’s also a lot to be said for creating connections between ancestors. Whether this means combining individuals or linked loosely, I need to be able to find out who else is researching my ancestor Abram Houchins, for example. And while family relations are the point of genealogy, there’s a largely untapped potential in including non-family relationships — friends, neighbors, business partners, etc. If I know that Abram’s neighbor was James Jones, I’d like to be able to link him in and (hopefully) find research on James that his descendants have done. Collateral research can help when one runs into a dead end.

Beyond that, I think it would help to expose records more. What I mean is, if I have the Shanks family Bible but no one else knows I have it, it’s only helping me. But if I make it known that I have it, along with Robert Shanks’s will and whatever other records I have, then other people can ask me to look things up for them or get copies or what have you. And then it’d be easier for me to find out if someone in Robert’s neighborhood kept a journal around the time he was there, giving me access to a firsthand account of what life was like then and there, just twenty yards down the road. Records live in libraries and archives, but they’re also in the possession of people, and I think access to those records needs to become easier and more widespread. People would, in effect, become small archives. :) (I do realize that some people won’t want to share records, but quite a few will, I think.)

Online sites and apps could also have requests for help, kind of like “Help Wanted” ads, where users list skills they have (reading 14th century Latin handwriting, for example, or a lot of experience with 18th century Italian research) or nearby libraries/archives they have access to (the Cabarrus County Public Library or the Family History Library or the National Archives or whatever), and the sites would then be able to connect people who need help to people who are able to offer that help. Even rudimentary things like recognizing what language a record is written in would be helpful. As for whether people would be willing to help out like this, for free, I don’t know. I hope so. :)

It’s also cool to show how you’re related to other people, both in your tree and other users — “You are Abram’s great-great-great grandson,” or “User smithjbm is your sixth cousin, twice removed.”

Integrate with the web

Online apps need permalinks for individuals and families so that people can talk about them. For example, my uncle asked where on our tree I wanted him to start researching. There was no easy way to point directly to the family I had in mind; instead I had to circuitously describe which people they were and how to know for sure they were the ones I intended and not others with the same name. A permalink would have made it extremely easy to e-mail him the URL and know that he’s seeing exactly what I’m seeing. It’s also handy when blogging and creating other websites.

RSS feeds and SMS/e-mail notifications are also biggies — feeds/notifications for changes in the database, search results, comments (and comments could be another way for people to collaborate), etc. Microformats would also be useful. And there should be tight integration with other online media — Flickr and company for photos (images of records, pictures of ancestors/places, etc.), Odeo for audio, Google Maps for historical maps perhaps, etc. Maybe even Skype.

Blogs are the research logs of the 21st century. Genealogy apps should take advantage of that, either through offering built-in blogs (modified to include whatever data should go in a research log) or through linking in an externally hosted blog via RSS. (Meaning, if I’ve already got my genealogy blog hosted somewhere else, the app would recognize that and pull in my recent posts as part of my profile on the site. I’d also be able to post to my blog via the app, using one of the blogging APIs. It could even specially format my post, adding in permalinks for people I mention in the post, etc. — kind of like LibraryThing touchstones in the message boards.) In addition, it’d be nice to include little pedigrees when writing a blog post, so the app could provide a “snippet” feature where it exports a two- or three-generation pedigree in HTML/CSS which is precooked and ready to pop into a blog post as-is.

Tags? I don’t know yet if these are truly useful or not. They’d probably be primarily for users to overlay additional semantic meaning — they could mark certain people/families/lines as “@library” or “call uncle jim” or “mary” (meaning Mary’s working on it) or whatever.

Thinking about and preparing for the growing popularity of other online access technologies like mobile phones, for example, is also wise.

Be open

People’s data is their own, and that needs to be recognized especially in a multi-user online system. Let them own it, because people are more likely to take care of something they see as “theirs,” even as they’re sharing it. (Saying that, I think of Wikipedia, where no one really “owns” anything. Even so, users kind of claim virtual territory — they have a stake in whatever articles they’ve contributed to — and it has the same effect.) Also, let people import and export in a variety of formats, so they won’t worry about getting locked into proprietarianism. :)

Well, this is long enough as it is. What do y’all think? (Feel free to add comments here or on BeyondGen.)

Technorati Tags: genealogy, Genealogy 2.0, Web 2.0, Flickr, Odeo, Google Maps, Skype, LibraryThing, BeyondGen

I spent a little bit of time on Ancestry’s OneWorldTree today, checking out one of my lines (Abram W. Houchins and Martha Sneed). Turns out there’s a huge amount of information on their ancestors (thousands of names). Now, I don’t know that all of it is correct, of course, but it’s a start (and it’s a lot easier to verify it when I know what it is I’m looking for).

Why do I bring this up? Two reasons. First, there’s no way to download it from OWT. No link to download a GEDCOM, nothing. Annoying. I’ll have to go through it all by hand. There are 50+ generations. Yes, that’s right. Good thing it’s summer.

The other reason is that when you have that much genealogy, it would be really, really, really nice to get an overview of what’s there, where the holes are, etc. So I think Beyond needs supercharts, which will be overviews of your entire tree (or whatever part of your pedigree you choose, let’s say), shrunk to the size of a single page. I don’t know yet if I’ll just use a really tiny font size or if I’ll replace the names with something else (somehow). (Ideally it would actually be legible text, and since it’ll be PDF I’ll also include the option of printing at a larger size, 5 feet across or what have you.)

And finally, this is addicting. :) I’ve written on Footprints from the Past about what I found, and it’s really fun. Even if it’s not all accurate. (And half the fun will be verifying it and finding out that it really is true, or isn’t, or whatever the case may be.) I need more time!

At any rate, I’m really looking forward to being able to pull all this external information into my Beyond tree, greyed out so I know it’s not verified. With PAF it’s too hard to see at a glance what’s real and what’s not. I plan to go through OneWorldTree when I get Beyond to a usable state, seeing what’s been done on all the lines in my tree. Then I can add it all in, conflicting information and all, and start the work of verifying without worrying about missing stuff. Ah, it’ll be great!

Technorati Tags: Ancestry, genealogy, OneWorldTree

I’ve created a new blog, Footprints from the Past, to serve as a place for me to record my genealogical research. What this means for Beyond is 1) I’ll be doing more research and thus be more aware of how Beyond can fill users’ needs, 2) I’ll be more motivated to work on it, and 3) I’ll have a good testing ground for figuring out how genealogies are best published via the web. (For #3, I look at some of the record manager-generated web pages out there and it’s really, really hard to find what you’re looking for on them, so I’ll definitely have some ideas there.) Sorry for the sloooooow rate of development at the moment, by the way.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, Beyond

Ran across a genealogy/Google Maps mashup today. That got me thinking about maps. The key about maps as far as genealogy goes is that things change over time. Boundaries move back and forth — just look at Alsace-Lorraine! — and using a modern map isn’t always helpful because of it. Not to mention the varying levels of detail you’d want, and other sorts of non-political boundaries (diocese boundaries, for example). Aye, it’s one heck of a problem. I don’t think the data itself is necessarily a problem, nor storing it — the problem is that the data isn’t freely available. Google Maps is doing a good job but it’s all present-day (which is fine for its main use, of course).

I’ve thought about user-contributed map data, but no matter what angle I look at it from, it seems like a bad idea. It’s the sort of thing that should be left to cartographic experts.

In an ideal world, all the data would be available for free, and you’d be able to pull in just the part you want — say County Down in Ireland in 1810, for example. (Meaning, the individual counties and parishes and such would be discrete entities able to be separated from the rest. It seems like much of the free boundary data out there just describes the boundary lines themselves. But I could be wrong.)

Ah, if only this were an ideal world…

Technorati Tags: genealogy, maps, Google Maps, cartography

On April 1st, MacGenealogy.org ran this announcement: Apple to Launch iRoots, iRoots Pro Genealogy Applications in 2007?. LOL, it’s a good read. At first I got kind of excited, but then I realized what day it was posted on and suddenly it all made sense (and the stuff later on in the announcement is…well…you’ll see).

Technorati Tags: genealogy, April Fool’s