As I was doing a little bit of research for a brief article about one aspect of Family Tree Builder 3.0, I came across something remarkable.
Back in January, when MyHeritage released Family Tree Builder version 3.0, I wrote MyHeritage hijacking homepages to alert my readers to unusual behaviour of the installation program. I also emailed MyHeritage.
In both that article and my email I advise them to try and understand that users do not like this sort of thing, and that it is unwise to go for the short-term gain at the cost of the long-term damage they do to their own company reputation.
I advised them to immediately withdraw Family Builder 3.0, and release a version 3.1 without the page hijacking code. So far, they have not done so. I just tried the latest download, and MyHeritage is still engaging in this practice.
I also emailed a bunch of questions to get several facts around Family Tree Builder 2.0 and 3.0 straight. MyHeritage’s Daniel Horowitz thanked me for writing about Family Tree Builder and promised to get me the answers to my questions as he got back to the office. That was in January, but the only answer I received after reminding them two times was a bit surprising.
On 2009 May 5, Gilad Japhet, the founder and CEO of MyHeritage, claimed that version 4.0 of Family Tree Builder would be released in one month or less (he was obviously mistaken about that), and that there therefore was little point in posting a review about version 3.0 at this time.
Never mind that they promised answers and still have not provided those. Never mind that his idea of less than a month does not match mine.
Here we have the founder and CEO of a company telling me that their product is really not worth reviewing at this time? Now, there is an interesting approach to product marketing.
This raises all kind of questions. It is only natural to wonder just what’s wrong with 3.0 that should be fixed in 4.0 that is so bad that the vendor would rather forgo attention for their product than risk someone writing about.
A stance like that is sure to pique the interest of any investigative reviewer, and perhaps That’s exactly the point. Maybe it is reverse psychology, intended to make me do a review of Family Tree Builder. As far as I can tell, Family Tree Builder 3.0 has not gotten a lot of press.
I just googled for
a Family Tree Builder 3.0 review, and there do not seem to be many. All the top
results are the reviews
(blurbs really) on download sites and the
occasional copy & paste blog that posted the press release.
Searching for reviews, I found
that the MyHeritage blog claims that ActualDownload.com has called Family Tree
Builder the most popular and innovative genealogy program for creating family trees.
Free, intuitive and fun to use
and given them an award.
Now, I had read that blog entry before. This time
round however, I had just been looking at a lot of download sites, that all
feature the exact same text about Family Tree Builder. I recognised the award
text, and I know
where the exact same text on practically every download sites comes from: from
the vendor itself.
That text was not written by anyone at ActualDownload.com, but by MyHeritage itself. It is part of the so-called Portable Application Description (PAD) for Family Tree Builder. You will find exactly the same text on many other download sites. The link below is to the original PAD file on the MyHeritage site.
So, MyHeritage creates a PAD file to make sure that their Family Tree Builder software is included on many download sites. Nothing wrong with that. That is how these download sites get filled.
In this PAD file for FTB they include a glowing description that seems, cough,
somewhat detached from the realities of the application. Nothing special about
that. Other vendors fill their descriptions with unrealistic superlatives.
The particular sentence they quote is part of the 250-char description, found between the
<Char_Desc_250> and </Char_Desc_250> tags.
They publish the PAD along with the software, and download sites pick it up.
Then, some months later, they pick one of these sites, ActualDownload.com, and
claim that someone at that download site wrote the glowing text about them: ActualDownload.com selected the FTB3 for the "Best Software" Award dubbing it
"the most popular and innovative genealogy program for creating family trees.
Free, intuitive and fun to use."
.
And oh, ActualDownload.com did not just write these glowing words, they even gave them a Best Software
award. Well, now that you now MyHeritage was dishonest about the ostensible
motivation for the award, you probably already suspect that the award is made up too.
There actually is
a Best Software
button next to the description for Family Tree Builder on
the ActualDownload.com site, it just is not any kind of award.
If you browse around the ActualDownload.com site, you will see the same button next to a lot
of software.
It is not an award of any sorts, it is just a star rating that software receives based on the average rating of reviews left by site visitors. MyHeritage got a five-star button because one visitor to ActualDownload.com give it that five-star rating. It is a five-star rating average based on one five-star visitor review.
That five star ratio is based on a review by Mario
on 2009 Jan 5. That is
practically directly after the release, which is remarkable, and the wording of his review
is remarkably glowing:
Great family tree builder, possibility to add photos, videos and documents and publish them. Collaborative working through myheritage.com. Clever SmartResearch technology to give you results about everybody in your tree from the most important databases on the web. 34 languages. basic version free.
It does not impress me like a review, but like an abbreviated version of the vendor blurb. There isn’t any user criticism, positive or negative, here at all. It is a mere enumeration of features.
In fact, that there is any review
at all is also rather remarkable, as ActualDownload.com does not shows thousands of downloads since January, but just 492
visits and 74 downloads.
ActualDownload.com lists Mario’s email address as mario_knd@yahoo.de. If you google that, you soon find that @mario_KND is Mario F. Ruckh, who is also known as mario@myheritage.com. This Mario used to work for Kindo, where his email address was mario@kindo.de. Kindo was acquired by MyHeritage.
The @mario_KND twitter account bio is blogger + marketing/PR @ myheritage.com.
.
Mario’s full name, twitter account and email address are on the German press release for
Family Tree Builder 3.0.
Other pages confirm that the mario_knd@yahoo.de email address is associated with
the ruckh.org domain. That site also links to his technorati profile, which
highlights the MyHeritage company and genealogy blogs as his favourites.
An update to the Geni.com Grumblings article notes that two of the four Amazon.com reviews appear to be written by Geni.com employees.
It now seems that I caught MyHeritage posting a maximum-star review
of their own product.
Thus, the complete sequence of event in the MyHeritage’s Award PADding scheme seems to be this:
review
award
It sure seems like MyHeritage is padding themselves on the back with MyAwards.
There is a remarkable error in the MyHeritage blog post; there is a space inside
the ActualDownload.com domain name, so that it reads Actual Download.com
.
Once you know that the award claim is false, it is hard not to wonder whether it
was just an unfortunate typo, or a deliberate mistake that can be passed off as a typo.
As
the text stands now, you are not unlikely to have misunderstood the text as
claiming that MyHeritage actually received an award from Download.com, a much better known site.
The MyHeritage blog entry start with a paragraph about the One Great
Genealogy Site
award they received from OneGreatFamily.
2009 is a good year for us, or at least for our Family Tree Builder! We got an email the other day from onegreatfamily that we’ve been selected by them to receive the "One Great Genealogy Site" award for the services we’re providing to the genealogy community.
What is a little odd about this paragraph is that OneGreatFamily’s One Great
Genealogy Site
award applies to web sites. If it weren’t for the name of
the award itself, this particular paragraph seems to claim that the award was
prompted by Family Tree Builder.
MyHeritage currently does not
appear in OneGreatFamily’s list of sites that received the One Great
Genealogy Site
award, but OneGreatFamily has confirmed they received it. The
page just has not been updated to reflect that yet.
If you provide a PAD for automatic inclusion in practically every download site, one of these site is bound to show your product as a featured download sooner or later. The MyHeritage blog post tries to pass of being a featured download on Chips.eu as some kind of award. It sure is nice to be selected as a featured download, but it is not an award.
MyHeritage has updated the blog post after being exposed, but did post any apology or otherwise alert their readers to the update. They did not update the blog post by striking through the relevant text or otherwise clearly updating the post with a correction. No, they completely deleted the evidence from the post as if it was never there, and then posted a message about the change as a comment. Thus, all readers who merely read the current post and not the comment section, as many people using feed readers do, are not honestly informed that the post has changed significantly since it was first published.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.