Genebook: Facebook for Geneology
I was listening to an interview with Mark Zuckerberg where he mentioned the idea that Facebook was not creating anything so much as 'revealing' what he called the 'social graph' - a way of representing how everyone on the planet knows everyone else.
It seemed to me that there are a few other graphs which could also be mapped by a web service. Once mapped these graphs could yield value to advertisers and to end users. One such graph is the 'trust' graph - who trusts who to make recommendations (see post). Another is the geneological graph - who is related to who.
Facebook gives you the option to reveal how you know someone. In theory, this should map out everyone you are related to as well. However there are a few drawbacks - the person has to be alive, on facebook, and everyone in the process must take it seriously. At the moment, I think my brother and I "met randomly in a freak paragliding accident".
Genebook would address these problems. The service could be a facebook application, or an entirely new site. You would start by creating a page for everyone in your family, going back as far as possible. You could add media and 'tag' it so that any photos of your long dead great Aunt would appear on her individual page. Of course Genebook would need to be able to have a 'family tree' view as well as a page view.
Without having done any research into current offerings in this market, it feels safe to assume that this much functionality is par for the course. The advantage of Genebook would be in aggregating the memories and media of the entire living family. If my cousin was to start using the service it would first confirm if they were in fact my cousin, then give allow them to add media or create pages for anyone that they were related to. This way, the living members of the family could be adding the various photos, sound recordings, newspaper clippings and oral history of the clan to create a whole that would be much more than the sum of the parts.
Of course there would be clashes and difficulties. Genebook would need to give users the ability to keep a family member link, or piece of media private or exclusive to certain other family members. Discrepancies need not be a problem in that the system could present differrent versions of the same page to different viewers - thus it would be very easy to agree to disagree. If a synthesis was desired, it could be handled in a very wikipedia way with the ability to maintain a sideline discussion.
