Geni, a new venture from ‘former executives and early employees of PayPal, Yahoo! Groups, Ebay, and Tribe’ is a different take on social networks, using the hook of family history and genealogy to get users and connect people. But where it falls down with me is that it is focuses on living people; it’s not a family tree as more of a family sprawl, reaching horizontally across people instead of the vertical descent that most family historians investigate. And it’d run to a stop in many families when it hots the people with no email address and no computers.

Looking at the screen shots, I love the interface design. I’d love to be able to use it to display my family history; I’d even pay for it, given how much money I’ve already spent on the hobby, jsut to have a better web experience than the one I’m currently using which is plain, old html tables. But as it stands, it holds no interest for me. But given the experience of the people behind it, it could have some legs.