Modern Software Experience

2011-09-20

MyBackup

BackupMyTree logo

BackupMyTree

BackupMyTree, a web service for backing up your desktop genealogy data, was introduced just over a year ago.
BackupMyTree was founded by Cliff Shaw, best known in the geneasphere for abandoning the paying users of Family Tree Legends. After selling Pearl Street Software, he created a series of web services, which are remarkable for their similarity to each other; ProtectMyPhotos was a site for backup your photos, PicStreem uploaded photos to the PicStreem web site, FamilyLink Desktop uploaded pictures to FamilyLink, and BackupMyTree uploads genealogy files to BackupMyTree; the difference is in the file extensions it grabs from your hard disk.
His web services folded because they lacked a sustainable business model, so when he introduced BackupMyTree a year ago, I naturally remarked upon its lack of business model:

business model

When DocSyncer folded, the official reason was that DocSyncer was a cool idea for which he had failed to find a viable business model. There is no convincing business model for BackupMyTree either. The current product is free. The site claims that a pay-for-use Pro service will be introduced later. That is the freemium model that did not work for ProtectMyPhotos, why would it work for the conceptually identical BackupMyTree?

After more than year, that question has still not been answered yet. The promised pay-for-use Pro service has not been introduced yet. So it's tempting to say that BackupMyTree still lacks a business model, but maybe the real business model was making a quick buck by selling the service to a third party.
You can call the string of similar services a string of failures, because they failed to bring in revenue. You can also call it persistence in the face of failure, now topped off by a successful sale.

MyHeritage

Early last year, I described MyHeritage as a company growing through acquisitions, and that description still seems as accurate now as it was back then; MyHeritage continues to augment its natural growth with acquisitions. They acquired Bliscy.pl, a Polish genealogy site that was still in beta in June of this year, and they just bought BackupMyTree. Their most recent acquisition before that was Zooof.com.

Incidentally, Pearl Street Software was MyHeritage's first acquisition, and it has become very clear why they wanted it; MyHeritage keeps promoting the SmartMatching feature they got from Pearl Street Software's GenCircles.

One thing the Zooof.com, Bliscy.pl and BackupMyTree have in common is that they are rather small acquisitions. Small is relative concept, but these companies were surely small compared to MyHeritage. The MyZooof screenshot shows that Zooof.com had only 9814 users and 347.916 profiles. MyHeritage's blog post about Bliscy.pl says the acquisition added half a million users. That isn't nothing, but not much compared to the 18 million family trees MyHeritage already had.

The press release for the BackupMyTree acquisition reveals that BackupMyTree has only 9 TB of data. The press release tries to make it sound like a lot, but it isn't all that much; even if you assume an average file size of about 1 MB, it still translates to less than 10.000 users for a completely free service.

None of these acquisitions was very expensive. The press value of these acquisitions - the amount of attention MyHeritage receives upon issuing their press release about it - may well be worth more than they paid for these acquisitions.
That does not imply that these acquisitions are wholly without strategic value. Zooof supported was more international, supported more languages than MyHeritage did. The acquisition of Bliscy.pl strengthened their Polish presence. The acquisition of BackupMyTree is a bit harder to understand.

backing up

It is easy to understand why Cliff Shaw wanted to sell BackupMyTree. It was hard for Cliff to try and convince people to trust their data to his service. After all, a track record of abandoning customers and gone-before-you-heard-about-them web services may show entrepreneurial spirit and go over well with venture capitalists, but just doesn't go over with people looking for a trustworthy backup solution, especially not when you do not have the promised premium service that would make it a sustainable business model yet…
BackupMyTree was losing money. Selling it to a well-funded third party saved him from having to close it down and got him some money. That money may well be used to improve another web service he started, called Mocavo, that he will probably be focussing on for now.

Mocavo

Mocavo is a genealogy search engine, like WeRelate originally was. WeRelate morphed into a shared web tree. Mocavo was introduced on 2001 Mar 16, but also seems to be morphing into something else already, or at least something more than just a search engine; on 2011 July 5, Mocavo introduced the ability for users to upload their family tree, to receive regular emails highlighting matches in the Mocavo index.
One has to wonder whether MyHeritage noticed that, with the addition of the upload feature to Mocavo, BackupMyTree became superfluous; why bother trying to convince people to trust you with the backup of their genealogy data on BackupMyTree, when they will eagerly upload their data to Mocavo.com in exchange for the alert service?

Buying BackupMyTree provides MyHeritage with an excuse to send out yet another chest-thumping press release and annoy the Ancestry gorilla they love to compare themselves with.

MyHeritage Backup

Buying BackupMyTree provides MyHeritage with an excuse to send out yet another chest-thumping press release and annoy the Ancestry gorilla they love to compare themselves with. There does not seem to be much strategic value in this minor acquisition. BackupMyTree backups your data to the cloud, and that is very fashionable web 2.0, but that is still no reason to buy it, as MyHeritage already has such a service: MyHeritage Backup.

MyHeritage introduced MyHeritage Backup on 2010 Jul 21. MyHeritage Backup is a paid service that is not included in a MyHeritage subscription - and backs up your data to the cloud.
There are two big differences between BackupMyTree and MyHeritage Backup; MyHeritage Backup only works with your MyHeritage data and is a paid service, while BackupMyTree works with all desktop data and is a free service. The press release sates that MyHeritage will keep it free.

MyBackup

MyHeritage may prefer all users to become paying customers, but seems to have a growing awareness that even their most loyal users do not fancy having their data trapped in a closed silo, and is now reaching out to users of other products and services in various ways.
This year, Family Tree Builder 5.1 added the ability to read other other file formats by incorporating GenBridge. The new Family Graph API allows third-party access to data on MyHeritage, and they surely are working with Real-Time Collaboration to develop AncestorSync for MyHeritage.

Backup YourTree

BackupMyTree is a very basic product, but it allows MyHeritage to get in touch with users of other products. MyHeritage will surely evolve BackupMyTree into a more substantial and complex product, and take advantage of the Family Graph API to offer some level of integration with MyHeritage.
It is likely that BackupMyTree and MyHeritage Backup will grow closer together, until it really are just two different front-end brands on two different domains for the same cloud-based back-end.
MyHeritage may well add the most important feature that BackupMyTree is lacking now; a Backup API of its own, that allows desktop products to directly integrate with it. A straightforward backup API can be so simple that the next version of Family Tree Builder, which will appear this year if MyHeritage continues to stick to its yearly release schedule, might already take advantage of that.

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