I recently spotted this article on TechCrunch that explains how Geni, a social network built on the premise of building family trees, recently raised 10M$ in financing following a 100M$ valuation. This is impressive considering that Geni has only been on the web for 7 weeks. It is impressive but not surprising when you consider that as of yesterday they already had 100,000 registered users that have added upwards of 2M family members to their trees.

My Family Tree

Geni is also interesting from a technical standpoint because of the technical choices they have made early on. As a presentation layer they chose Flash and as a back-end they seem to have latched on to Ruby. By leveraging the inherent agility of Ruby as a language and combining that with the simplicity through which you can create stunning and interactive front-ends in flash, Geni was able to hit the market quickly and have a lot of the pizzazz needed for it to stand out.

The impact of these choices is clear simply by looking at the fact that Geni was founded in early January and made it to our browsers for the first time on January 16th. Although I would not have used Flash as a presentation layer myself, it was clearly the right solution for getting Geni to market as soon as possible. My only fear with Flash on the front end is that subsequent development iterations will take longer due to the internal organization of their views with Flash. This could allow their competitors, such as MyHeritage, to progress faster.

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