This post
This morning I was struck by an idea: applications have been on Facebook for a couple of months now, but so far not a soul has put together a genealogy app. It’s an almost perfect fit — Facebook is a massive social network (30 million people as of Tuesday), it’s already got features for sharing photos and videos and tagging people and such, and with the API third-party developers can create applications that do whatever you need. So I wrote it up on my Beyond blog. Thoughts?
My initial thought upon viewing this was: “Great idea. What college student is really going to use it?” But mere seconds later, I became much more optimistic. I don’t know how complex you could make it per Facebook’s constraints, but I think that it would be a great application and a wonderful way to let those who are already interested in genealogy to integrate it into a much wider social network, and it can help introduce family history to those who have either been just nominally interested or never entirely thought about it before.
Much better than that frat/sorority app, in so many ways.
I say go for it.
I think it’s a really great idea. Good job Ben. Good luck.
I don’t know how it happened, but the original post (on my Beyond blog) is now the first hit when you google “facebook genealogy”, as of yesterday afternoon/evening. That was fast!
Anna: Keep in mind that Facebook is expanding beyond just college students. I wouldn’t be surprised if in another few years it has lost its college connotations and become the predominant social network for all people of all ages. And that’s definitely an audience ripe for a genealogy application. I wish I had time to write it myself, but I don’t, so I’ll leave the implementation to those who do. :)
Alyssa: Thanks! :)
Well I would definitely include hard-core disclaimers to verify any posted information with other sources before using it to complement your research, since anyone could post anything, but other than that it’s a great idea!
I think given time it could really take off. Due to my own little Scottish connection, I’ve discovered an entire enclave of people just desperate to learn about their family heritage. Having an app that helped the process along could not go amiss, imho.
Haley: I guess I hadn’t really been thinking about it from that angle — about people looking on others’ trees for information — but instead had been thinking of it primarily from a place-to-store-your-research angle. But of course one of the advantages of using a social network like Facebook is indeed the social bit :), so yes, I agree.
Mali: And the nice thing about having your genealogy on Facebook (well-protected, of course) is that you could get to it from anywhere in the world. No longer would you be bound to lugging around a PAF file, and of course PAF doesn’t work on Macs or Linux boxen anyway. The web is the future.
I’ve only been on facebook a little while, but I went looking for a geneology app tonight thinking it would be great to have…
I’m not a developer, but here are some thoughts how it might work…
The person who starts the tree would put in all the information that they know to build the part of the tree that they are aware of… they would then connect their relatives who have facebook profiles to the branches in the tree. This would then give those people rights to edit the tree as well… if it had to be limited perhaps it could be to direct descendants and progenitors. As one person links to another and people get tagged, their own trees would be added to those of the others… again, you could only edit your parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, etc, but you could see others across the boundaries.
Perhaps that would limit things too much - perhaps individuals could add entries to other branches for information, but it would be “non-authoritative” - or all information would be non-authoritative until confirmed by several others.
Anyway, I love the idea and Facebook makes sense to be the host for it… it could be the google of geneology!!!
The question of authority is one that wouldn’t be so much of a problem if people didn’t just swallow up others’ research without paying attention. ~sigh~ Ideally, everyone would realize that nothing should be taken at face value, no matter how good it looks, unless there are accompanying source notes — how the information was obtained, how likely it is that it’s accurate, possible contradictions, what records were used and how to check them, and so on. But unfortunately most of the genealogy being done these days is done with reckless abandon and nary a thought to these matters. ~bigger sigh~
