OneGreatFamily is the company behind the eponymous OneGreatFamily web site. That web site debuted on 2000 Jun 1 as one of the first collaborative genealogy sites. As a paid-access service, it never became as popular as some other sites, but it was matching trees to each other before GenCircles did.
OneGreatFamily just announced GenealogyCloud. There are two nearly identical press releases, and there is no other information about GenealogyCloud on the OneGreatFamily web site.
What is pretty clear from the press releases is that GenealogyCloud is not a something for end-users, but for genealogy software developers.
Information on the GenealogyCloud service is on a separate GenealogyCloud web site. That site has documentation, some example code and a PowerPoint presentation. If you study all of that, you get a good idea of what GenealogyCloud is.
GenealogyCloud is a web-based service. It is a database service that does not
offer some generic database interface, but a genealogy-oriented interface instead.
OneGreatFamily calls it a web-based genealogy record keeper back-end system.
Developers can take advantage of this database back-end to concentrate on development of their application, without having to develop and maintain it themselves.
That OneGreatFamily offers a ready-made genealogy database back-end is interesting development already. What makes it really interesting is that it is more than just a database, that the GenealogyCloud service includes some worthwhile genealogy-specific features.
There is just one back-end database, but each user has its own view. Data conflicts are detected and visible, but each user sees the data as they themselves entered it. A user can accept the other data, ignore it, or collaborate with the other user to resolve it. At no time is there a need to agree, or will one user’s data bluntly be overwritten with the other user’s data (as still happens with so many social genealogy sites), all users keep their own unique view of the database.
GenealogyCloud has a group collaboration feature. User can choose to collaborate in one or more groups. Each group has its own view of the database, just like a user, the only difference is that multiple users have access to that view and are allowed to change it. Meanwhile, all those users keep their own private view.
OneGreatFamily has been offering automated matching of individuals in one
tree with those in other trees for some nine years now. They love to claim
that their proprietary HandPrint™ algorithm produces the best known automated
match results in genealogy today
. What’s perhaps more important than the
question whose automagic matching system is best, is that the user keeps control over whether to
merge or not. Users can opt to merge automatically, but do not have to
accept any match.
Tree merging features are built into GenealogyCloud. They have to be of course, to make sure the merging is done right, to ensure that the merge process preserves every users unique view of the data.
If all those features sound familiar, That’s only because these are the distinguishing features of OneGreatFamily. All of OneGreatFamily products (Family Dashboard, Genealogy Browser and RelativelyMe) are using GenealogyCloud already.
GenealogyCloud is simply the first public version of their own platform, and OneGreatFamily is quick to point out that they spend more than ten years and some US$ 10M (about € 7,5 M) developing it.
GenealogyCloud is offering the core of OneGreatFamily, with all the functionality that competing vendors are not even offering in their own product yet, for use in third-party products.
GenealogyCloud is offering the core of OneGreatFamily, with all the functionality that competing vendors are not even offering in their own product yet, for use in third-party products.
GenealogyCloud offers all of it. Questioned about this, Robert Armstrong confirmed that you could build a virtual copy of OneGreatFamily site.
That few vendors handle conflicts between different trees smartly may not seem very surprising
because it is not trivial to get that right. But think again, some of these competitors
had lots of time, have investors with deep pockets, and even started with a so-called green field
situation.
That such vendors still do not manage to offer the same features is of course exactly why OneGreatFamily hopes to sell them on their GenealogyCloud service. It is a logical idea, and the time-tested features are a great selling point, but that still does not make it an easy sell.
GenealogyCloud is a commercial service. Any developer taking advantage of its will have to pay license fees. OneGreatFamily has not announced pricing, each developer will have to negotiate that with them.
OneGreatFamily is open to licensing deals based on revenues, and also has a
free to use option that offers limited functionality as long as we can market
full functionality to users
.
That is rather vague and invites speculation as to just what the free use functionality is. Robert Armstrong, Senior Vice President with OneGreatFamily, explained that this refers to the limited free functionality as offered by GenealogyCloud to all comers. You can experience it in their own RelativelyMe application; all the features are there, including smart matching, but until you (or the developer) pays, it is limited to your own data.
There is one thing worth noting though. OneGreatFamily offers each developer
a choice of either having their own, initially empty database, or use the
existing OneGreatFamily database - and the latter option is cheaper.
Developers who opt for a separate database cause higher Oracle database
licensing and hardware costs, and OneGreatFamily has to pass that cost on.
OneGreatFamily is not charging for access to the OneGreatFamily database, but proposing to
jointly own data
; I will leave the legal complications of that phrase for
others to debate, but the practical meaning seems to be that developers get free
access to all OneGreatFamily data when they decide to contribute their data to
it.
That way, all third-party developers benefit from the data contributed through
other third party developers, and OneGreatFamily benefits from having an even
larger database to attract users and developers with.
OneGreatFamily does not have a training program for GenealogyCloud. The documentation and examples are all there is. They are willing to perform some custom development as part of a license deal.
I recently commented, in New FamilyLink site integrates with FaceBook, after noticing a OneGreatFamily advertisement in We’re Related, that a collaboration between FamilyLink and OneGreatFamily seemed logical, that their thinking could be that if you combine We’re Related with OneGreatFamily, the combination might surpass Geni.com in every important way. Now that OneGreatFamily has opened up their database back-end as the GenealogyCloud service, FamilyLink can easily go ahead and do it, but so can their competition.
The introduction of GenealogyCloud is not important because it has
Cloud
in its name and cloud computing is the fad du jour. It is important because it is the first attempt to
market a genealogy-specific back-end, and one with some built-in smarts too.
It is important because the GenealogyCloud API is the first public programming interface to a shared genealogy database (whatever New Family Search is, it is decidedly non-public). That is a significant development in the genealogy market.
It is important to OneGreatFamily users too. There is no doubt that OneGreatFamily hopes that opening up their database to third-party products will help increase their database size, and that would benefit the users.
OneGreatFamily has not made a statement about this, but it is not illogical to think that this introduction may signal an attempt to move away from developing for end-users. If enough third parties make software that takes advantage of GenealogyCloud, OneGreatFamily would no longer have to make such software themselves. OneGreatFamily would be able to focus their development and support resources on GenealogyCloud.
In the longer run, OneGreatFamily might even stop offering their service directly, no longer offer anything directly to end-users, but only deal with the companies that offer front-ends for their back-end.
The problem remains that although GenealogyCloud’s time-tested features are a great selling point, it still isn’t an easy sell.
It remains to be seen whether FamilyLink or others will want to use GenealogyCloud in their own products. Several companies have their own matching technology and are likely to simply continue marketing that as the superior alternative. Some other companies that might have been interested buying OneGreatFamily to obtain exclusive use of their technology may be uninterested in using that same technology now that is available to all.
The GenealogyCloud service offers a web interface, but that does not imply that it can only be used by web applications. As long as there is an Internet connection, a desktop application can use it to. Adding this as an extra feature might make perfect sense for a desktop application vendor that does not have some genealogy database web site of its own.
GenealogyCloud is not just a new genealogy product or service. It is the first commercial product in a new category.
That OneGreatFamily has some kind of interface between their desktop
Genealogy Browser and their OneGreatFamily web site is not unique.
There is an
interface between Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.com, there is an interface
between MyHeritage Family Tree Builder and MyHeritage.com, and there is some API for
New FamilySearch (NFS), but none of these interfaces are publicly documented.
OneGreatFamily is the first to publish their API for everyone to see, no strings attached. OneGreatFamily additionally provides a free sandbox system to try the sample or any other code in. Using it requires no more than registering for a free developer account.
All that sounds great, but there are several issues that stand in the way of GenealogyCloud becoming a big success.
One issue is that, even after almost ten years on the market, OneGreatFamily is still relatively unknown; users are likely to ask for integration with some commercial genealogy database services, but not likely to ask for OneGreatFamily integration and without users clamouring for it, vendors are unlikely to hurry to support it.
I already mentioned several reasons why vendors may not be eager to integrate
their own offerings with GenealogyCloud. Vendors simply prefer to market
something unique or superior.
Another consideration is that any vendor using
GenealogyCloud would become dependent on OneGreatFamily - which is still a competitor!
OneGreatFamily has introduced GenealogyCloud, but is still offering commercial
services to end-users.
Thus, any company using it would have to pay fees to
OneGreatFamily while they are competing with them for the same customer euros.
It is a fairly unequal competition too; why would you opt for some product that
is merely powered by
GenealogyCloud
when you can have OneGreatFamily, the original GenealogyCloud
product? Any third party vendor better offer something unique to make their
product stand out.
There is one simple measure that solves these two issues at once; change the
paid-for end-user offering into an advertising-supported free service. Making it
a free service will attract wide media attention, make it a popular destination,
grow the user base, grow the database and increase brand recognition.
All this will make it a more important and attractive service to integrate with,
without competing with GenealogyCloud clients for the same end-user euros.
Even if other vendors are willing to consider using a third-party solution for their back-end, they need to know about it first. As the first company to offer this kind of service, OneGreatFamily cannot simply convince potential clients by showing them a feature chart that highlights that their service is better than the competition, but needs to explain the logic of the category itself.
I did note one peculiar issue that I questioned OneGreatFamily about.
The GenealogyCloud Application Program Interface (API) documentation describes a GedcomUpload
method for uploading a GEDCOM file to the GenealogyCloud, but lacks
documentation for a corresponding method to download your data to a GEDCOM file
again.
It took a few emails to get an answer on this issue. OneGreatFamily states
that import works, but that they are still working on export. Armstrong added
that There will be throttling built in, because we do not want users harvesting
out all the data in the system
.
Despite these issues, GenealogyCloud’s future may be bright (pun intended). Multiple genealogy
vendors have shown interest in using GenealogyCloud. Armstrong is not naming
names, but questioned whether any vendors of desktop genealogy applications had
shown interest, he answered quite a few
.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.