A couple of things up front:
- I’m not a privacy bigot. You can find me on facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, multiple blogs, flickr, my own personal website, and my corporate bio page. I post fairly liberally about myself online.
- I probably have the best existing genealogical records for my family. I’ve spend HOURS formally interviewing my oldest living relatives, writing down their thoughts, touring grave yards, going to family farm land that my family lost during the great depression. I’m fairly interested in the topic.
So as I’ve started to think more about social networking, I became interested in the possibility of social networks to make genealogy work in the large. It makes intuitive sense to me that social networking is an ideal way to build a genealogical graph. The information is distributed and hard for one person to collect, but not so hard when each person contributes a node and a few branches.
Then I stumbled on Genetree. This company uses genetic testing to automatically build family trees, or at least to connect distant relatives.
OK, sorry, you lost me there. I have to submit my genetic material to a testing lab, have it encoded and stored in your data center, so that you can broker connections between me and my long-lost relatives in Scotland and Alsace-Lorraine?
Yeah, no. No thanks. Let me know how that goes for you. By the way, congratulations on getting funded. Can I speak with your investors?