October 2009

We’ve added ten spooky new gifts just in time for Halloween. Let your family know your thinking of them by sending them one of these ten new gifts: And don’t forget, Pro’s now get unlimited free gifts. Send a Halloween gift now

http://www.geni.com/people/Amelia-Earhart/6000000002447374242 Today’s featured popular profile is Amelia Mary Earhart, the aviation pioneer who disappeared mysteriously while attempting to circumnavigate the globe in 1937.  

Discover interesting Geni profiles with the new popular profiles list. View the most popular profiles in your family or in all of Geni, and choose the time period to see who is the most popular recently, all time, or in a specific month. The most popular profiles in the last week include 1 talk show host, 2 US Presidents, 2 Biblical figures, 6 Kings and Queens, 1 Mayflower passenger, and 1 of the richest men… Read the full story

Have you ever wanted to let your friends know about a profile you’ve found on Geni? Maybe you discovered that you were related to someone famous, or just come across an interesting new relative. Use the new “Send this profile” link on any Shared profile to post the profile on facebook, twitter, or dozens of other services. You can also send the profile as an email message. After you click the send this profile link,… Read the full story

We’ve added a new way to find other Geni users also interested in the profiles you browse. When you view a profile you’ll notice a new list of users who have recently viewed that profile. You can click their name to view their profile and contact them. If you see someone’s name appear a few times on profiles you’re viewing, their is a pretty good chance that you are working on the same part of… Read the full story

Profile Name Display Recently we added name preferences to let users choose how they want names displayed on Geni. Users told us that they missed viewing the full name on profiles so we’ve changed it back. Now profiles always display the full name, including middle name, last name, and maiden name. Undo Pending Merges Users have also told us that they often come across pending merges that they can complete but not undo. This makes… Read the full story

Geni.com experienced network difficulties starting the morning of Tuesday, October 20th. Users may have experienced Geni pages that did not load due to network timeouts. The site was taken down at 3:45 PM Pacific time to investigate, and was brought up and down several times through the evening. Our engineers worked through the night to trace the problem and restore service, and Geni.com was brought back online at 4:30 AM Wednesday morning. At no point… Read the full story

Wednesday morning update: Geni experienced network routing failures overnight. The site was put back online around 4:30 AM Pacific time. No data was lost during this period. We are sorry for any difficulties you experienced during this time, and will have a more complete update later today in another blog post. All site features are functioning normally at this time, but if you experience site instability, please let us know at help [at] geni [dot]… Read the full story

Data Drill Down Every statistic now includes a link to drill down into that data behind the chart or tag cloud. You can even click on the chart itself to view the profiles for a particular piece of data – a slice of a pie or bar chart or a name in a tag cloud. For example, here is the Country of Birth chart for my blood relatives: From this chart I can: View the… Read the full story

Based on user feedback we’ve made a number of improvements to our recently enhanced lists: Free Sort Controls We’ve moved the sort controls to the column header and made them available at no charge to all users (sorting was previously a Pro only feature). To sort a column click on the up (ascending) or down (descending) arrow next to the name of the column you want to sort. These sort controls will appear when you… Read the full story

All Geni Pro subscriptions (new and existing) now include unlimited virtual gifts at no additional cost. Virtual gifts are a great way to show someone that you care, and can be sent with a birthday or anniversary greeting, or “just because”. With subscriptions available for less than three dollars per month (when prepaid), you can save money even if you only send a few gifts a month. Upgrade to Geni Pro

Improved Pending Merge Interface Pending profile merges now use the newer side by side format. Multiple pending merges will all appear at the bottom of the merge page so you can quickly resolve multiple merges. When you act on one pending merge the next one will automatically load for review. Use the carousel of pending merges at the bottom to jump ahead to a specific pair. Better Conflict Permissions The Tree Conflict icon now only… Read the full story

Name preferences now appear in your settings as well as your tree settings and apply sitewide. The default is still to show maiden name in parenthesis in the tree and not show maiden name on the rest of the site. However, you can choose to always show maiden name across the site if you would like. We display a warning message when a living person is more than 125 years old, there is a death… Read the full story

UPDATE: We're back! Geni.com will be offline for a few minutes. We'll let you know when we are back.