OneGreatFamily Blog

I’m back.  It was a good conference.  Very well attended, with over 1,500 people from what I’ve heard.  I’ve been to many genealogy conferences and that one was as well run as any I’ve been too.  Congratulations to the My Ancestors Found team for running a class event.

The unstated theme of the conference was that New Family Search (NFS) is real.  Given that I have been talking to the Church about NFS for five years back when it was called Common Pedigree, it is a little freaky that it is finally really real.  But it is.  It is being rolled out by Temple district.  The Church did not give any indication when that process would be completed, nor when the system would be usable by non-members.  But there were people at the conference who were using the live system and so it now is a matter of time.

I said it was the unstated theme of the conference for two reasons:

First, every software vendor I talked to is working on supporting NFS.  Some see it as simply something they have to offer.  Others view it as a key feature to grow their business.  But everyone was working on supporting it.

Second, most of the room would raise their hand every time a presenter would ask about people’s experience with or interest in NFS.  It was clear that the crowd at this conference was excited about the product and anxious to use it. 

I am going to write a separate blog entry on New Family Search, and how it compares to OneGreatFamily.  I was encouraged to see clear distinctions between the two.

It was nice seeing old acquiantences, many who I haven’t seen in years. 

• Tom Kemp, who is now director of Genealogy Product for NewsBank was there. 
• I got caught up with Leland Meitzler, Managing editor of Everton’s Genealogical Helper, who has been through quite a wild ride in the last few years.
• It is always a pleasure to catch up with Dick Eastman.  He had his eee PC there and I had my Nokia N800.  We shared gadget experiences. 
• Ken and Dave from Legacy Family Tree seem to be doing well.  
• Bruce Buzbee and I go way back–it is nice to see Rootsmagic doing well.
• I had a nice chat with Craig Scott, who I haven’t seen in years, from Heritage Books.  He still has a ton of Automated Archive CDs that he can’t move, but his business is doing well. 

And two special mentions…I finally shook hands with David Lifferth from World Vital Records.  We did a joint promotion together, but it was over the phone so we hadn’t met.   And after all these years I got to meet Pat Ritchie (aka Myrtle), which was fun.

All in all, it was a good conference.  I learned some things and caught up with old friends, plus I found a great Thai restaurant in St. George (Benja Thai and Sushi).

I will be heading down to the Family History Expo in St. George this Friday and Saturday.  If you are there, feel free to come up and introduce yourself. We will not be manning a booth this time, as I want the freedom to connect with alot of other players in the industry.  But I think next year we will have a booth.

I haven’t been to a genealogy conference in over a year, so it will be interesting to see how the industry continues to evolve.  Having attended genealogy conferences for over 12 years, I am always facinated to see the continuing evolution of the industry.  Many of the people stay the same–stawarts like Beau Sharbrough, Leland Meitzler, Megan Smolenyak, Tom Kemp, Kip Sperry and so many others. But the companies change pretty regularly.  12 years ago Ancestry was just another little company.  I was the first employee from Banner Blue Software, publishers of Family Tree Maker, to regularly attend genealogy conferences. Many companies have come and gone, including Corel, Palladium, Commsoft, and tons of others.  And many of today’s companies, like Geni, World Vital Records, Footnote and FamilyLink.com were far from their first thought of existance.  

I’ll write up some observations next week.  In the meantime, I hope to see you there.

Today we are launching a joint promotion with World Vital Records.  We will both email our respective customers a special offer for the other’s service.  WVR has come along way since their launch and we are excited about working with them on this promo.  Who knows, it might open up additional opportunities in the future.

All of us at OneGreatFamily hope that all of you have your best year yet.  This year is going to be a big one for us, with many new features and services coming on the line.  A few predictions for the year:

1. OneGreatFamily will more than double our number of subscribers.  Given the new capabilities we will be rolling out I expect to see a big jump in subscriptions.

2. Several other companies will close up shop.  There are too many family tree sites as it is, with more coming.  Most offer no competitive advantage–they just let you build a family tree on line.  Many of these sites will run out of money this year and shut down. Choose wisely where you invest your time and energy in building a family tree.

3. No other competitor will actually get automated tree matching to work again this year.  OneGreatFamily has been doing it for 8 years now, and no one else has figured out how to make it work.  Remember, half the battle is identifying the overlap in trees, but the other half of the battle is in maintaining the differences in trees even after they are merged.

4. The significance of the Internet to daily life will continue to grow, as amazing as that might seem.  We are still at the leading edge of the Internet era, and more powerful and creative uses of this tool will continue to stream forth, making it more and more central to our lives.  As such, Internet-enabled devices are going to become ubiquitous.  More and more people will have internet access with them all the time.

5. Social networks are going to continue to grow and evolve.  They are not a fad.  The newsfeed in Facebook is just way to useful, especially as someone figures out better filtering.  Imagine if stuff going on in the lives of all your friends could be on your newsfeed.  What a marvelous way to be aware of the things going on it others lives.

6. The battle between Facebook, MySpace, Open Social and a host of others is going to really heat up.  I think it takes too much energy to keep up several social networks, so people are going to pick one and stick with it.  That means a fight to get and keep users is coming.  And given the stakes involved, it will be quite a fight.

Well, those are just a few of the things that I believe will come to pass this year.  What thoughts do you have?

Rob Armstrong
Senior Vice President, Marketing and Sales

I almost forgot to mention one of the main reasons for this recent release was to get Genealogy Browser to work correctly under Vista.  It now does.

One of the big changes we made to Genealogy Browser for Family Dashboard was the ability for Family Dashboard in a web page to invoke Genealogy Browser, load your family tree and invoke a specific ancestor as the selected individual.  This is interaction is what makes Family Dashboard so much fun to play around with.  You see someone in Family Dashboard, click on this button , and boom, you are now looking at that person in Genealogy Browser within your family tree.

Well, when we first implemented the capability it worked great under Windows XP but it didn’t work well at all under Windows Vista.  Vista does alot of things very differently, so we had to pretty much change the way the whole mechanism works to get it to work under Vista.  Although Vista hasn’t exactly caught fire as an operating system, its use is rising steadily and we knew we needed to fix this.  It is now fixed in this release. 

So all you Vista users, rejoice and enjoy!

Here is where you can find the link to share your family dashboard.  Now all your relatives can view, explore and enjoy your family history work, but you don’t have to work about them messing it up. 

And here is the tab to get to the Advanced My Home page:

Actually, we launched it last week, and I’ve been so busy between work and the holidays that I haven’t got around to blogging about it till today.  Sorry about that.

It is actually a pretty major release.  I’ll write about a couple of big new things, then I blog later about some of the other cool things.

The best new feature is the ability for you to share your Family Dashboard with others.  This is so cool because most of us would like to share the genealogy information we have with our family members, but there has never been a very good way to do it.  Well, now there is.  The first thing you need to know is that they can’t mess up your data!  Your genealogy information is being shared “read only”, which means that your relatives can look, tinker, explore, but they can’t change anything. 

Equally important, though, is the ease and fun of Family Dashboard.  It makes all your genealogy so accessible, and fun to mess dig around in.  Even your most uninterested relatives, you know the ones whose eyes glaze over at the slightest mention of genealogy, will have fun digging in.  So share often.  You might even get some family members more intested in helping when they see all the work you have done.

The other feature I want to spotlight upfront is the new “Advanced My Home” tab.  This new tab allows you to choose the number of columns on your Family Dashboard, from 1 to 5.  Further, the columns are now variable size so you can take full advantage of your monitor’s full resolution.  We also remove the graphics at the top of the Family Dashboard, so you can see more widgets.  Everyone I’ve encountered so far has quickly switched from Default My Home to Advanced My Home because it gives you so much flexibility.

There is more in this release, and I’ll blog about it later.  In the meantime, enjoy!

We are working on a new home page design.  The current home page was launched way back January 2006.  It has been tremendously successful for us.  Still, it is getting a little long in the tooth so it is time to change it up.

So now we are working on a new page design.  This will mostly affect new site visitors, as anyone who has signed up for an account, come to the site and logged in should be going to the Family Dashboard now.  By the way, did you know you can always go from Family Dashboard back to the main site Homepage.  You do it by clicking on the “Classic Home” link in the black toolbar.

The hardest thing is to explain to people who aren’t familiar with OneGreatFamily what it is that we do.  Most people think we are just a collection of trees.  Explaining automated merging, matching, Family Dashboard, Genealogy Browser and all the other goodies you get at OneGreatFamily can be daunting.  If you have ideas, please feel free to comment.

Thanks, Rob

I have made a screen capture video that shows how OneGreatFamily works. While under 5 minutes, I think it captures much of the essence of the site, especially for people who don’t want to do Genealogy. I also intend to make a similiar video that addresses how OneGreatFamily benefits the genealogy hobbyist.

This is an experiement for us, as I put the video up on YouTube. The resolution there is quite constrained, so I’m not sure how it will turn out. I may have to post the video elsewhere to get sufficient resolution to make it useful.

Here is a link to the YouTube page:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRLWzLKqA1M


Feedback is appreciated.(Blog entry originally posted October 16, 2007 - moved to WordPress October 17, 2007)

I read today in Dick Eastman’s blog about yet another company that is launching a beta version of a “new Web site where relatives, friends or professional genealogists can work together or alone to help grow their family trees”. By my count, that makes about 6 in the last year: Zooof, Geni, Famillion, MyHeritage, FamilyLink and TreeX. Talk about a bandwagon everybody wants to get on.

I read today in Dick Eastman’s blog about yet another company that is launching a beta version of a “new Web site where relatives, friends or professional genealogists can work together or alone to help grow their family trees”. By my count, that makes about 6 in the last year: Zooof, Geni, Famillion, MyHeritage, FamilyLink and TreeX. Talk about a bandwagon everybody wants to get on.

This reminds of a situation I watched with interest in the early computer game industry. I like to play computer games, especially Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Early successfull titles included Warcraft and Command & Conquer. I still remember one December edition of PC Gamer magazine that had 22 titles. With the success of Warcraft II and C&C: Red Alert, everybody and their brother had decided to get into the RTS game. Unfortunately, two realities converged. First, RTS games take alot of time and effort to learn to play well, so most gamers only bought a couple of games. That meant that ultimately the market simply couldn’t support 22 RTS games. Has anybody ever heard of Warbreeds. I didn’t think so.

The market will not support all these family tree websites. I suggest you be careful in who you pick, because alot of these new entrants will not be around in a year. And all that investment in entering data, learning the system, and such will just evaporate.

OneGreatFamily launched about 6 years ago, and none of the new players has yet to match the core power of our system. That power is in our ability to do automated matching and merging with View Preservation. Automated matching means a system that can automatically compare every new entered individual with every individual already in the system, and identify obvious duplicates. This saves the user an enormous amount of time and effort in searching. Our patented Handprint™ matching algorithm allows you as the user to focus on interesting situations instead of obvious ones.

Merging with View Preservation means that when the individuals are merged no data is lost, and each individual is able to see the data items he or she had before the merge. View Preservation is an imperative with merging. It is simply unacceptable to lose data in a merge. View Preservation is also very hard to do. This means keeping track of every single user’s unique view of the shared family tree—i.e. unique dates, places, relationships, spellings, etc. That’s a big task when you have 500,000 or 1,000,000 users to keep track of across 160,000,000 submitted names. We have to keep track of each and every one’s unique view of each and every shared individual in the shared family tree.

Instead, these new systems are all based on a “last one in wins” model that is simply unacceptable to genealogists. For example, lets say that you and I share a common ancestor. But you say he was born on August 6, 1887 and I say it was August 7, 1887. In these other systems, whichever of the two of us was the last one to edit the record will have our chosen value be the value for birth date. In fact, I have seen people get into wars where one will change the value, then the other changes it back, then the first changes it back, and so on. Not acceptable.

Many of these sites are touting their ease of use and in some cases they have really done a nice job. It is amazing what you can do in Flash these days. But I would stack Genealogy Browser’s functionality up against any of them, especially since GB routinely handles trees containing in excess of 40,000 people. I can’t wait to see the Flash application that can do that.

We at OneGreatFamily are working hard to make our system the best, most powerful, and easiest of use of all the systems. But most importantly for you, the user, please know that we have been in business for 7 years, that the company is profitable, that we are cash flow positive, and that we pump all of our profits back into the business. We have been here and we will be here, long after many of these other new guys have folded up and exited quietly.

Rob Armstrong
Senior Vice President, Marketing and Sales

(Blog entry originally posted September 28, 2007 - moved to WordPress October 17, 2007)