Webware

It's Our Tree is a genealogy service that lets people create very simple family trees using Adobe Flash. Like Geni (review) and Kindo (review), the idea is to get your entire family involved by inviting them to join and add family members they remember. It doesn't offer some advanced services like DNA sleuthing using cheek cells, but it's incredibly simple to get started, and the finished product can double as a Rolodex, birthday reminder, and private e-mail system for you and your family.

Like Geni and others, to get started you simply add family members using the directional arrows found on each person's block. There's support for divorces, first, second, and third marriages, half siblings, and any other oddly conceived (literally) member of your extended family. It also supports nine different languages, meaning if you're trying to share your tree with your Italian grandmother she'll be able to see it in her language, including the invite to participate. It's a nice touch if your family is spread out.

Each family member you (or others) create gets his or her own profile in case you feel like turning the service into an updatable family phone tree. My one irk with this is that they don't take advantage of a pre-existing contact-management service like Plaxo, Gmail's contact list, or LinkedIn to save you some time of having to dig all that up. What does make these profiles interesting is that you can add all sorts of geo-data to your family members including the place of birth, death, burial, and present location. This information can be toggled on a large Google map, which can lead to some really great exploration if you're willing to spend the time researching and inputting it all. Ancestry.com's DNA service will do something similar, although it actually shows you where your family is from based on cultural migration.

I'm giving this service a thumbs up, although if you're already tied to one of these services, its feature set is nearly identical to Geni and Kindo, so give it a look before trying to get your whole family to convert. Grandma will say grazie.

Make your family tree quickly and easily with It's Our Tree. It's got support for half siblings, deaths, and geo-location for where people were born. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

GenieTown, a new services matchmaking service, launched yesterday. It helps you find service people. CEO Hassan Chafi told me that he built the company because, "acquiring services is harder than acquiring products."

There are dozens of services directories and finders, so I was curious to understand how GenieTown will differentiate. Chafi told me that he wants his site to go after the "long tail" of service providers, the same way eBay went after the odds and ends people have in their attics. To be more precise, he hopes that GenieTown will be where the part-time, semi-pro caterer lists his business, so that he'll be able to connect with the person two blocks away who's looking for a reasonably-priced local service provider to cater her kid's birthday party.

Fix-it people.

That's an interesting differentiator, but the site is also useful for traditional service listings--local plumbers, accountants, and actual professional caterers. And at this early stage, there are already plenty of professional listings on the service (at least in the first official market, the San Francisco Bay Area).

GenieTown is a modern directory with fancy Web 2.0-ish features. Users get points on the system for writing articles on service-oriented topics, and customers can rate the performance of service providers.

The site appears to have everything that's necessary to solve the service-finding problem. Except users. And that's the big issue. What will stop people from going to Craigslist, ServiceMagic, Angie's List, and Yelp when they want a plumber?

It's a simple SEO play, Chafi says. That's why he has a system to encourage users to write articles. That text will be search engine bait, he believes, and will help the site rise in the rankings when a user Googles something like "plumber weekend Oakland CA."

There is no fee to use GenieTown yet, although in the future the site will probably handle payments and take a transaction fee in return.

Also coming up: social network integration. If Chafi can successfully build a service that helps people monetize hobbies and skills they are passionate about, some sort of tap into social networks could be a big multiplier for some of the providers on the service. Not so much for plumbers, perhaps, but people looking for help with their macramé might find a future GenieTown feature that helps them not only find people they can pay for help, but communities where users can set up group workshops and things like that.

For the moment, the success of this business is all in its search engine rankings. That's a scary bet, but we've seen the same gamble pay off for a few other companies.

Kindo is a new genealogy site for users who want to create an online family tree. Like Geni and Amiglia, Kindo runs on Flash, and makes it dead simple to start building up your family tree with very little programming expertise whatsoever. You start with a mother, father, and child, and you can continue to work up and out, adding more people as you go along. To help aid in family tree creation, you can invite your family members to claim their profile, which will give them privileges to add and remove members from the tree.

Besides the very basic and simple implementation of the tree creation, there's also an integrated social network for families who want to dig a little deeper. Each family member gets their own profile, which shows off any included personal information, along with a list of updates they or others have made on the service. There's also a status update option a la Facebook and Twitter that lets you announce what you're doing to your family members. More helpful, however, is the birthday and anniversary reminder tool, which will automatically let you know when there's a family birthday coming up. While both these things can be had elsewhere, it's a nice touch.

One of the past criticisms we've had with sites like this is how they handle the non-nuclear families--single parents, adoptions, half siblings, and the like. The good news is that Kindo has planned ahead, and easily lets you add a half sibling, or a single parent to any part of the family lineage. There's still not a simple way to deal with adoptions, but you can add notes to someone's profile when you make it to denote that the mother and father they're tied to aren't the birth parents. You can even note if they're deceased.

Make a family tree quick and easy with Kindo, a new genealogy service.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I give this site the thumbs up for its simplicity. It took me less than 10 minutes to piece together my immediate family, and that of my uncle's. As long as you've got their pictures handy you can even give them thumbnail icons too. What would really take it to the next level is integration with Plaxo, so you could pick and choose from your e-mail contacts to populate the graph. The only thing I'm worried about is how they intend to make money, as there's no advertising or premium service. The only thing they've got going that I can foresee helping them make any cash are links to parnered sites like Moo, Amazon, Photobox, and Skype.

Also worth checking out is Ancestry.com, which will do the hunting and data entry for you, as long as you're willing to part with a couple hundred bucks and some cheek cells.

At some point in life, you've likely been introduced to, or taken part in six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the movie trivia game that puts your film knowledge to the test to figure out who has worked with whom. The result is often impossibly obscure chains of actors and films, and the realization that you've absorbed an unnecessary amount of Kevin Bacon knowledge without realizing it.

Tileplex is a new service that can most easily be explained as a mix between the famous film trivia game, a genealogy-style mapping service like Geni (review), and Amazon.com. Everything is user-generated, and the hope is that you'll be able to see how products are linked up, or where they originate from, assuming knowledgeable people have taken the time to link them together.

The clearest example of where this would be helpful is with something like the iPod. Linking together the various models on Tileplex will give people a tool they can explore, and understand like any other hierarchical chart, along with links to buy said products, or dig deeper if need be. The result is a small network of nodal connections that get their own product pages, and a hit parade of related links.

The only crux of the service? Its building and searching tools, which are slow, and make it nearly impossible to re-order and organize a mosaic once an item has been linked up in a process called "Slinxing" (get it? It's like a link, but it needs a new name). Compared to some of the mindmapping tools we've looked at in the past, along with Geni and Amiglia (review), when the core functionality of a service is linking, it shouldn't be so hard to go back and make changes, which is unfortunately where Tileplex falls flat.

With Tileplex, you can create a web of products and link them together. In this case it's Meat Loaf, hot sauce and pulp novels.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I was chastised yesterday by the team at Geni (a Webware 100 winner), because I pronounced the company name wrong on a video. It's "Genie," not "Jenny," I was told. Because the product is a geneaology service.

Say what?

Makes sense. But, dear entrepreneurs, if you want people to pronounce your company a certain way, you shouldn't have to ship a user's manual with your logo. Many products these days are easily mispronounced: Jaiku, for example (the CEO says like "haiku") and the same with Viiv and Wii.

Mispronunciation is not just an annoyance, it's a potential marketing problem. Brand reinforcement doesn't work when people are calling one product different things.

And wacky Web 2.0 spelling doesn't even have to get in the way. Case in point: Zooomr. Even with its imbalance of vowels, it can only be spoken one way.