Geni - Genealogical Social Networking

Recently joined the Geni social networking site and found this software quite interesting. It functions as a genealogical tool that also has a social networking aspect.

You invite your family, via maual entry or email address book mashup, to collabroatively create your tree. It has all the usual aspects of a social networking profile page but also ties up with a calender function to remind you of birthdays, anniversaries etc.

Any family occasions can be entered and photo albums linked, so no forgetting that wedding party where you fell asleep and woke up with your face painted on!

You can also invite friends to view your profile, as with other social networking sites, but they can't see your family network. At present still some glitches with adoptive links and western-centric views of kinship and family but the forums said that they were looking into these. Future aspects also include an import/export function for remote editing. Ideal for anthropological fieldwork.

Some problems that could arise, and with family they always will, might be sensitivite aspects like family viewing of paternity issues and what information should be recorded/ kept secret but all in all two thumbs up.