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Los Angeles based Geni has never forgotten that China is one of its most important potential market. No wonder it has put 10% of its employees in China.
Geni provides a flash powered, Google Maps like interface to manage family tree. Unlike other social networks, users’ profiles may have been created by their family members before they join the network. Profiles in the network could be 20 times of actual registered users.
Earlier in September, I had a discussion with Alan Tien, General Manager of Geni China, about whether this family tree based social network will ever fly in China.
In this country, people have a long history of managing family trees. Certainly we are not talking about visual interface like Geni, but those yellow papers kept in a box sitting deep under your bed. So they should like to have such a tool?
Geni’s viral feature is email invitation. But email is a way underused tool in China, especially in the last generation. You cannot imagine family members eating in the same table would say, “Let’s social on Geni.”
Another barrier for such a service is the single child policy. For most of us, our family tree looks rather slim, unlike those western families with flourishing family forest.
As GM of Geni, Alan is quite clear of all those cons for Geni to spread in China. In fact, above points first come out of Alan’s mouth. How people who have just learned to boot their computers see your service matters, not those of internet savvies. The best way to predict a service’s future is to launch it and see how things work.
Anyway a Chinese version of Geni is necessary if it really treat this market seriously. Local competitor is rising from the horizontal.
Famioo is a days old service similar to Geni. It doesn’t have a decent flash interface to manage your family tree, but it provides more features for sharing just about anything including blog, photos, videos, RSS feeds, music, event, etc.
Famioo is focused on managing your family, family friends and communication among them. While Geni still puts emphasis on maintaining your personal profile. While this is not big deal, just slightly different forms of expression of the same concept. But to this point, I prefer Famioo as more acceptable by Chinese users.
Thanks Showeb20 for the tips.
family tree, Famioo, GeniPlease kindly take our reader survey to help us improve contents, thanks.
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