MyHeritage -- Snaps Up Geni.com

*too busy matching to continuously combat the negativity hehehe

My initial reaction wasn't such a happy one, but once I took the plunge and started using the matches I was really glad I did. It's worth it to me, but it may not be to others (or not possible) *shrug

Like everything else on Geni, most people are willing to help you if you ask nicely.

Justin and Jeff, maybe you have not really gotten the point.
I was a lifetimer and the blue dots have been sold to me for 600 dollars.(???)
They are not worth a dime. I am certainly a small vocal minority and most of your members do not care about us. As I said before - without insulting anybody - the geni management is a mismanagemant.

(No Name) I think that as someone who was a lifetime member you will get a paid data subscription for a period of time. That may or may not be of use to you, but you should have access to it.

LOL, Gerhard. Do I have ancestors named Anders Andersson and Nils Nilsson?? You bet I do! It might not be obvious to real Swedes, but my last name is the English version of a Swedish name. A quarter of my ancestry comes from those lovable Swedes, with their deeply conservative naming customs. Some days I'd swear on a stack of Bibles that half the men in my Swedish ancestry were named Johan, and the other half are split between Anders and Nils.

So, yes. I understand what you're saying. Geni sucks when it comes to matching Nordic names. We've had curator debates about this. You might guess that curator Bjørn Brox has very good ideas about how they could do better. After two years here, I still haven't worked my way through all the bad Smart Matches in my tree. If life were fair, every developer and every curator should have to spend a week doing Scandinavian genealogy as a penance ;)

Yes, I understand. But that's not a reason to hide the matches. Show the matches. Remind people of the work still to be done. And give us all a chance to keep complaining that we need better matching.

MH will listen, I think. They are proud of their algorithm, and it looks like it might be better than the one Geni was using. But, it's not final.

My advice would be to leave the blue dots. Work on them (or not) as it pleases you. In the meantime they aren't hurting anything.

Private User They are offering a discount currently....

The blue scars are hurting me plenty. They look aesthetically very displeasing. There will be no end to questions I will have to answer to my relatives. Since I will not subscribe to MyH, I can not reject them, and they will remain a permanent fixture, masking my real merges on Geni.com.

The folks like me who don't want these scars understand perfectly well that some Geni users find them great and love them. That is all well and good. I can't for the life of me understand why those who want the blue scars can't understand the frustration of those who don't want them. Time will not remove these scars. If we don't pay for MyH we will never see these scars go away. For us, it is not a matter of not liking change, nor is it a matter of getting used to it over time. For us it scars our tree views, our merge centers and our home pages. We are not asking to abandon the links between Geni and MyH, we are happy that some folks like them, all we are asking for is a setting(s) to disable the linkage for those who don't want it. I don't understand why there is such an objection to this need.

Mark Harold Melmed Here's an idea.... ask a user who subscribes to MH to collaborate on your profiles, handle the matches and then remove themselves as a manager from your profiles. Typical collaboration among Geni users in my experience. It's really not the end of the world.

Mark Harold Melmed I can only try to answer your question from my own perspective, I can't speak for anyone else.

To me, it seems as though no one is getting LESS than they were before, therefore there should be nothing to complain about.

To me, the blue dots in Tree View are no more displeasing than the green squares indicating that there are more generations to look at. Neither is particularly pretty, but they're easy for me to ignore, or to decide to check out.

To me, the blue dots in profiles are totally innocuous.

To me, at every business, individual, or other concern that I interact with, there are "offers" made available - attempts to entice me to spend (more) money. There was a huge furor over banner ads on websites when they were first introduced, and now we ignore them. We download pop-up blockers if we hate pop-ups, or we ignore them. We "supersize" or not, ad infinitum. Lots of this stuff could be annoying if we let it, but it's not worth the drama. And asking McDonalds, or any other business, to stop trying to upsell me is an exercise in frustration. Why beat my head against a brick wall? They have the right to try to get me to spend more money - especially when the alternative is for them to raise their prices across the board.

I'd far rather ignore attempts to supersize than have to pay more for the services/products I *do* want!

Just my humble viewpoint...

Well said Jennifer. Bravo!

I would like to commend Justin Durand, Private User, and Private User for their efforts to try to squelch all of the hypothetical scenarios that people are playing out with the introduction of the Record Matches and Smart Matches™ recently introduced by Geni.com.

I personally like this option and use it to my advantage and discretion. No one is forcing me to take part in this new feature.

Thanks again!

@wendi: I mange over 20,000 profiles. Do you know how long it would take me to assign 20,000 profiles to someone else? And then how long it would take for that person to go through all of my blue scars (probably in the thousands) for me?

@Jennifer: You may find the blue dots innocuous, and I have no problem with that. I find the blue scars extremely disconcerting for the reasons I previously mentioned, and you ought to be fine with that.

In addition to the blue scars all over my trees, this problem also interferes with my use of the actual Geni merge suggestions found on my trees, plus making my merge center a mess, plus making my home page a mess.

@Joel: No one is entitled to "squelch" my needs and feelings. I am fine with some folks liking and actively using the MyH interactions, and I respect that. My point is that it is not to everyone's liking, and that ought to be respected as well. The folks who find it not to their liking (like me), also find it in the way and intrusive. We would like a simple way (via settings, perhaps) to turn these interactions off. I really don't understand why that is such a terrible thing.

Hey Mark Harold Melmed -

It's not a terrible thing, and in an ideal world a site like Geni would be customizable for everyone. But when there are millions of users, it's almost impossible to create settings and tweaks that will make everyone happy.

Let's assume there are somewhere around 250 minor settings that 1-10% of users would like. It would take us forever to build and maintain every single setting, and that would be a big distraction from building the larger features that help the world family tree grow. So we have to factor that into the equation, and in many cases it's more important for the community at large that we focus on big features rather than the really small ones that would help a small percentage of users. Make sense?

And thanks for the feedback! We'll be constantly improving Record Matches over time. Keep in mind that this is the first release, and once we have feedback from users we'll definitely be making improvements, and maybe some of them will be with display and notifications.

@George: Do you speak officially for Geni.com? If so, I am leaving Geni.com for good and removing all of my profiles.

This problem is not one that effects 1-2% of the users. It effects far more. We have put up with so much nonsense over the years - for me, this is the last straw.

det kan ikke være korrekt , at geni ikke sætter noget i værk,
så vi kan selv vælge om vi ønsker at se på disse blå faldskærme

min forside af træet har ikke mindre end 12 stk jeg ikke kan fjerne

men det bliver være og være jo længere jeg går ind i træet

kunne de så bare fjerne denne frygtelige farve og lave den neutral

så de ikke står der og skriger ind i ansigtet på en når man åbner

lav den dog uden denne skrappe blå, neutral som vores match var før , dett ville kunne tage noget af , vreden over dem af

I am sorry but when the proposed matches in someone else's tree carries a photograph of my grand mother that only I uploaded into Geni and simply contains the information that I added (and have to pay for the clearly valueless carrot due to the fact that someone at MyH/Geni clearly just uploaded my information into a dubious family tree to entice me to enlist to another business model for which I have already paid), it smacks of sharp practice if not down-right fraud.

I have no problem with MyH trying to move all of the acquired Geni customers to its MyH platform (that is normal practice in an acquisition), but they paid the shareholders of Geni for this priviledge and I don't see why I should providey MyH with a second bite at the cherry.

It would be better if MyH did not try to pretend that they want to run 2 separate platforms and brands but acknowledge that their intention is to merge the businesses. In that case they can either move Geni customers to their new platform when their membership expires, or offer a fair conversion option (i.e. membership of MyH less unexpired membership of Geni.

After all, the membership fees for Geni and MyH go to the same eventual interested parties!

Mark Harold Melmed If you take the "blue scars" as scars then they are scars, if you take them as opportunity for somebody else then you should just let them be and ask any of your collaborators or family group members who might have the MH data subscription to check them out and confirm or reject, that way you won´t have the "blue scars" any more bothering you. If you really decide to leave Geni then you will get a choice whom you want to give the profiles you manage, a particular person, your closest relative as manager or entire Geni community, so the profiles just change the manager. I guess you won´t start deleting the profiles you manage. First of all there are plenty of them mildly said and all of them are recoverable and you will be able to delete only the profiles that are connected from one side. So i would suggest that you learn how to deal with them and in the end you might start to find them useful.

Theunis Viljoen, MH and Geni did not copy the information over to MH and they have no control over someone with access to your tree creating a duplicate tree. They are only saying that your tree here looks identical to a tree on MH, which apparently is accurate. Seems if you don't know the person from MH that manages those profiles, you might want to message them.

MH does not want to merge Geni and MH. They have different goals. Geni is a world family tree, MH is a lot of isolated trees, but they can both pull from the same data services and the same matching technology.

Jaak, now if they color coded the new deal such that blue dots would mean Geni matches, black dots for the written records, and white for MyHeritage matches, understanding would be a bit easier.

Yes, i know that these would be colors of Estonian flag, but i am not the decider or artist to know which colors would be the best :)))

I want to say just one thing. If you pay annual fee of Geni. Farfor must also pay at Heritage? All information that we write where automatic goes to Heritage and any use of our work, but that we ourselves get something out of it. I saw all of what I wrote on Heritaget. Also photos, information and more.

Private User, that is incorrect. No information is automatically transfered to MyHeritage. If you see your information over there, it's because a family member copied it over there. Geni is not transferring your information. As for the annual fee to Geni, it does not cover a data subscription because those services have a much higher cost, as does the DNA service. http://help.geni.com/entries/23390398-Why-aren-t-Record-Matches-Sma...

Jack Tulp: From what I've seen, these blue scars point merely to redundant data that someone has else has planted in MyH. It is very frustrating that now that many of my trees are finally free of the need to merge (thanks to three or four wonderful curators!), and the trees finally look presentable to my my family, that MyH has come along and added these scars.

How long would it take for curators and other family group members to wade through my 20,000+ profiles and remove the scars? 6 months, a year, two years?

Are you threatening me by telling me "I guess you won´t start deleting the profiles you manage. First of all there are plenty of them mildly said and all of them are recoverable and you will be able to delete only the profiles that are connected from one side. So i would suggest that you learn how to deal with them and in the end you might start to find them useful."? Daring me? Baiting me? I don't understand, nor appreciate your choice of words.

I just read: " Curators are given ... Full view and edit permissions for your profiles, so they can assist you at your request." I never knew this before.

Does this mean that curators can handle my 20,000+ profiles to delete the blue scars? Would they be willing to? How long would it take? Can they do it without my asking 20,000 times?

We (curators) cant handle your blue dots, unless we are either in the family group, or a co-manager *of the profiles* with the matches.

The blue dots vary in content. Some are to actual records, which will be increasing all the time as new record sets are made available. Some are to MH trees, which new ones are added all the time as well. So like merging, even after the initial ones are resolved, new ones will occasionaly appear.

How long dealing with the initial set of potential matches will take would depend on many factors. If you have very well filled in profiles already, then obviously most MH tree matches wont have new data. Then they will likely only take a few seconds to confirm. I would suggest starting with those in your close family area, those are the least likely to be resolved by anyone else. Co-managed profiles may get done by someone else.....so give it a few days to see how it looks then.

Mark Harold Melmed I don´t threat you nor bate or anything else like that. I just tell you the facts. You can´t know for sure that all the blue dots are useless and these shouldn´t bother you, just let them be and let it take 6 months to check them out. Rome wasn´t built in a day also.

Kristina: Thanks for your feedback. I supposed that curators would not be able to handle my blue scars, but I just wanted to verify that. Your advice works well for folks with small trees who are inclined to spend the time, effort, and money checking through MyH, knowing that the vast majority of the time is wasted. I have neither the time nor the money to waste on that effort. That is why I am striving so hard for Geni.com to provide alternative strategies.

Mark, as for now, I believe the rule for who can accept / reject the matches is profiles in your family group, profiles you manage, and ancestors up to 20 generations. So if a curator or another member with a data subscription falls into any of these areas via the world tree, those matches should eventually get resolved.

Geni just showed me a Smart Match (one of Mark Harold Melmed "scars") which gave me 5 new siblings for my wife's g g g grandfather. I saved them as a source and can enter them on Geni as I check them out.