MyHeritage or Geni?
This is not a family history post. Just a little bit of techno-genea-babble.
So the news is out today that MyHeritage has bought Kindo and wants to become the "FaceBook of Families". So here's my short take on all this.
When I started my family tree, I found a free online application through a link at the Diaspora Museum. It was very basic, but it was enough for me to start from scratch. Then, a short while later, I ran into MyHeritage. I liked it because it had Hebrew support (at the time I thought it would help me translate Hebrew and Yiddish names to English, which it can't, so that feature was useless on my non-Hebrew computer), it looked like it had a lot of bells and whistles (I was a real newbie, so I had no idea what to even look for at that point), it had a consolidated research section and it was free. After I downloaded the free application and started playing with it I found out that it had a few limitations, with the biggest one being no ability to merge GEDCOM files.
I also found their cool website tree feature, their automated matching tool and Megadex search. But this is where things started to go downhill. I wanted to wipe out my tree and start fresh because I had so much new information to add. Since I couldn't merge files I started using RootsMagic. My thought was to create a consolidated GEDCOM and then upload it to MyHeritage. But then I found out that the free web tree can only have 1000 people in it. And I couldn't delete my original tree! I tried contacting support several times, but nobody ever got back to me. So I just stopped using the site altogether.
And then I found Geni and loaded my entire GEDCOM into it (with over 9000 people at this point). And I invited everyone to participate. And they did. So at this point, switching back to MyHeritage is just plain not going to happen. I also found a bunch of relatives on Geni and we were able to easily merge our trees.
I looked at the MyHeritage site again today after a long break and found a "delete tree" button that actually worked. I also saw that their fancy photo matching feature is only available to Gold and Platinum accounts, so I guess I won't be using that any time soon. What I did instead is create a new tree that has about 900+ people in it and is based on descendants of 6 generations of my daughter's ancestors. This will allow me to do some free matching as well as do some research on the MyHeritage site. When I'm done with these 900 I will delete the tree and load additional people to research and try to match.
I understand that MyHeritage has to have a business model and I wonder how many of their 25 million members are actually active or have a tree that is larger than 1000 people (most trees I see have only three people in them, I'm not even kidding). If the revenue from larger sites is not substantial and there are other free tools out there like Geni, I suggest MyHeritage find other business models instead of their current one. Buying other companies and spending money on R&D without a revenue stream is a great way to go broke.
I will still use MyHeritage and I am sad to not be able to support and Israeli start-up, but there are better free tools out there. For now.
UPDATE: I just thought of a couple of other things. First, I mentioned how bad the support sucked at MyHeritage when I was trying to delete my tree. On the opposite side of the spectrum I have to commend Geni support for being quick to respond. They didn't solve the problem, but at least they got back to me. Which brings me to two interesting problems I found and one suggestion:
1) If you try to send too many messages, they will not get delivered. Instead they will get stuck in some mysterious queue and not get unstuck until someone from support does it manually. This happened when I ran a search for some surnames and tried to contact multiple people. And it happened more than once. At least support fixed it right away. They also told me to send less messages or send them slower. Hmmm.... Interesting answer.
2) Merging trees is not as easy as you might think. If someone has a tree already and you send them an invite to join your tree the trees will merge. Then you can go about sorting out the discrepancies and deciding what information stays. But what happens if you want to merge things by yourself? Let's say you just added a huge GEDCOM to your tree, how does that work? Well, you need to create a second account, give it some other e-mail that is not in use at Geni, load your GEDCOM and invite yourself to merge. Kind of roundabout, but it works. I tried it.
3) If they could add a chat function between online users, that would be awesome.
