Well, we find ourselves among some august company indeed! The folks over at the MyHeritage.com blog have selected their top 100 genealogy blogs, and we are on the list! And all the same day I got some good Smart Matches too!
Check out the list at the link above.
By the way, Daniel Horowitz of MyHeritage.com is coming to this year’s Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree. Another good reason to be there in Burbank!
MyHeritage.com has announced its acquisition of OSN, a network of 10 leading European family sites based in Hamburg, Germany.
In a press release distributed from London, Tel Aviv, and Hamburg, MyHeritage said that the OSN acquisition makes MyHeritage the largest international site on the Web dedicated to families. The acquisition includes Germany’s Verwandt.de, Moikrewni.pl of Poland, and the American site Dynstree.com. MyHeritage said that the expansion gives it a combined network of 13 million family trees and 47 million members worldwide. It also gives MyHeritage a presence in major Latin American markets.
“By integrating these market-leading services into a single international platform, we are taking a great step towards realizing our vision of connecting families around the world,” said Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage.com.
Board member Saul Klein said, “Facebook has built an amazingly useful graph of our social connections and LinkedIn of our professional connections, and MyHeritage.com is building a uniquely valuable graph of our family life, both past and present.”
MyHeritage will establish an office in Hamburg to integrate OSN personnel. OSN technologies will be integrated into MyHeritage starting with an application called Family Crest Builder which goes live on MyHeritage today.
In fact, the technology blog Tech Crunch reported earlier today that “all of OSN’s information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of” this morning.
TC’s Sarah Lacy wrote:
Post-deal, MyHeritage is far beyond most genealogy competitors with the exception of Ancestry.com, which started in 1983, has spent some $80 million acquiring census information and went public last year. But there’s a key difference: MyHeritage is more about living family members, and Ancestry.com is more focused on, well, ancestors. So in practice the companies are far different. There’s more interaction, communication, and photo and video sharing on MyHeritage because—bluntly put—more of the profile-owners are alive.
Daniel Groezinger, co-founder of OSN Online Social Networking GmbH, said, “Since 2007, we have built our services into market leaders in key European and Latin American markets and we’re excited to work with Gilad and his team to make it easier for families to keep in touch and bridge gaps of geography, language and time.”
Geneablogie will review the added features on MyHeritage this weekend.
MyHeritage.com announced Thursday in London and Tel Aviv the release of Family Tree Builder 4.0. The key improvements of the new version include a map module, a family toolbar with Family Chat™ and extensive support for albums to organize a family’s photos, videos and documents, the company said in a press release.
Gilad Japhet, CEO and Founder of MyHeritage.com, was quoted in the press release:
“With the new map module, people can get an appealing visual representation of their family’s life journeys. They can also map the addresses of family members, quickly find all events and photos associated with a particular place and even standardize place names using smart suggestions. This provides a fascinating new perspective for millions of people interested in their family history.”
MyHeritage said their new family toolbar provides direct access to family sites on MyHeritage.com, adds search features and “Family Chat,” – a text, audio and video chat system built specifically for family use. Members also receive useful birthday reminders on the family toolbar without leaving the Web page they are on.
The company’s press release also says that Family Tree Builder 4.0 adds slideshows for showcasing family photos and a new screen saver that displays family photos based on tagging and face recognition technology.
Family Tree Builder 4.0 is free to download [http://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder?affid=pre01]. MyHeritage says that there have been more than 5 million downloads of the software to date.
MyHeritage.com is available in 34 languages, is home to more than 33 million family members and hosts profiles of 360 million people.
For more information, visit www.myheritage.com or http://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder
Comment: This sounds very interesting. I particularly have been interested in mapping functions in genealogical software. I’ll try it out and report soon.
The following news release was received from MyHeritage.com. For more information please contact:
Daniel Horowitz
Genealogy and Translation Manager
Office: +972-3-9702614
Email: Daniel@MyHeritage.com
SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENTS AND EXPANSION FOR MYHERITAGE GENEALOGY SEARCH
ENGINE
The updated “MyHeritage Research” now queries around 12 billion names in 1,526 genealogy databases from across the internet
Tel Aviv, Israel – February 19, 2009 – Our latest addition made the MyHeritage Genealogy Search Engine more powerful, as we have expanded our database to include now 1,526 genealogically relevant databases, representing more than 12 billion names.
You can get to it by going to http://www.myheritage.com/research or you can still access it directly from our software Family Tree Builder.
We have expanded our database by 150+ new sources. Some of the new sources are:
· Facebook
· Digg
· Spock people finder
· Michigan Census
· German Emigrants Database
· BMD Registers UK
· USA Gov search
· Western Michigan Newspapers
· Palatines to America
· US Social Security Death Index
· Prague Police Headquarters Conscriptions (1850-1914)
· Consolidated Index of Sephardic Surnames
· Arizona Birth and Death Certificates
· European Patent Office
MyHeritage Research accesses only genealogical resources which helps researchers find those websites and databases most relevant to their unique family histories. This allows you a much quicker and efficient search, so you don’t have to wade through volumes of non relevant records.
You can perform a name search using different spelling options: Exact, Soundex, or our unique Megadex spelling variations. Megadex allows you to choose from the most commonly used spelling variations of last names, cutting down on the time needed to research name variations. Read more about Megadex here:
http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/megadex.php
Using the Advanced Search option, you can add birth and death dates. Based on the information you enter, our search engine will automatically select the databases most relevant to your search.
There is a lot more information on the Advanced Search on our genealogy blog!
http://www.myheritage.com/blogs/genealogyblog/2009/02/easy_searching_myheritage_adva.html
In addition, MyHeritage allows you to store and annotate your searches for further reference. These tools allow you to focus on the results of your search, not the mechanics.
We hope those extensions will make it easier for everyone to research their family history and improve the family tree.
About MyHeritage
MyHeritage was founded by a team of people who combine a passion for family history with the development of innovative technology. It is now one of the world’s leading online networks for families, and the second largest family history website. MyHeritage is available in 34 languages and home to more than 28 million family members and 300 million profiles. The company recently acquired Kindo, a family social network, and is based in Bnei Atarot, near Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, visit www.myheritage.com.
Soon after Tuesday’s post about MyHeritage, the company responded. I got a lengthy comment from Alon, portions of which I’m bringing up here.
COMMENTER (Alon of MyHeritage.com): . . . IMHO, the fact that you received a positive Smart Match and got in touch with a relative after entering just 3 people in your tree, shows the power and coverage of MyHeritage more than anything else.
GeneaBlogie: I agree with that statement. That’s never happened at any other site I’ve tried out.
Alon: With regards to the prices you quoted, MyHeritage is now on a special for the holidays and some of its plans are 50% reduced.
GeneaBlogie: I think that’s great. A number of companies are running specials at this time of year. This is a good one.
Alon: The help FAQ does have an article about deleting trees, is it possible that you didn’t search the FAQ, but only looked at the most popular articles? You can run a search for ‘delete’ and find it easily.
GeneaBlogie: Alon is right about this. Being constructive, however, I would like to suggest that the “Help” or “FAQ” link appear on the front page, perhaps in the same line as “My Profile” and “My Sites”.
Alon: The Live Chat button doesn’t provide 24/7 chat, it works during our business hours; and when we’re offline, it says so on the button, and then you can leave a message. How many genealogy companies that you know, even have a live chat option to begin with? The fact that you got an email response in 3 days and not even being a paying customer (these receive premium, immediate support), is not that bad. In some companies you wouldn’t get any reply at all.
GeneaBlogie: Alon has a good point here as well that most genealogy companies do not have live chat. That point and the others he makes were amply illustrated the same day I wrote that post, when I went to cancel my Genealogy.com subscriptions (more about why in a later post). It was very difficult to find any information about cancellation on the Genealogy.com site. When I did find it, it was an email form. I filled out the form and pressed “Send.” I was then taken to a page which said that if I wished to cancel, I would have to call them. So I picked up the telephone and called them. It was still during business hours in the Mountain Time zone. The number rang and rang, but was never answered. No “All of our representatives are busy,” no cheesy holiday music; just ringing. And when the phone had rung a certain number of times, it simply hung up! Talk about frustrating!
I would say however that I hope if MyHeritage is going to continue “live chat” support that they extend it outside their Tel Aviv/London business hours. It’s a global economy out there and people want support when they want it. I’m sure this will entail some not insubstantial costs (but if people want it when they want it, they’ll have to pay for it!).
And I confess on second look that that the Live Chat Button does note that they were off-line at the time.
Alon: If the smart matching feature isn’t as smart as you wish, please send us feedback and examples! We are currently in the progress of improving it drastically and we always like to get suggestions.
GeneaBlogie: I think the SmartMatch feature is about as smart as Ancestry.com’s search engine with “Exact Matches” off. That’s pretty good considering the affordable, available technology.
Alon: With regards to aiding researchers, I recommend that you try out our genealogy search engine at http://www.myheritage.com/research. It searches almost 1500 genealogy databases in every query, I doubt you’ll find anything quite like it on the Web, and it may assist even very experienced researchers.
GeneaBlogie: I had forgotten that I had tried the “MegaDex” search engine some tome ago. I do agree that it’s unique and that its results are good.
I clearly missed some things about MyHeritage that are important, so I’m going to spend some more time with it and report again in the future.
I was quite excited a few mornings ago when I opened my email and found a message from MyHeritage.com that said, “Craig, You’ve Got SmartMatches!”
I had signed up for MyHeritage in June to see what it was all about. I had posted an abbreviated family tree consisting of myself and my parents. Then as the summer went on, I got distracted with real time family issues and I forgot about MyHeritage. So getting word that someone in my three-person family tree matched someone else’s tree was interesting news indeed.
As it turned out, the wife of one of my cousins in Kansas City was working on her family history on MyHeritage and had used their Family Tree Builder software to create a family Website. MyHeritage has several levels of privacy control, and hers was set at “mixed site,” meaning that some items were visible to non-members and other information was restricted. A person may request to become a member of a family site, subject to the approval of the Webmaster.
I went to her site and sent her a message. I explained who I was and that I wanted to become a member of her site. Within a very short time, I got word back that I was approved as a member of her site. I got a very nice message from her and we began a dialog about exchanging information.
In part to help her and in part out of my own curiosity, I tried Family Tree Builder. I created a GEDCOM from my Roots Magic file and loaded it into Family Tree Builder. At that point, MyHeritage began to raise MyHackles. Family Tree Builder asked if I wanted to create a family site for the family tree had just created. I pressed the NO button. Family Tree Maker and MyHeritage ignored my command and created a family site with two family trees: the three person original one and the new one!
The next problem was that my second tree has something more that 3,800 individual in it. That exceeds the Basic Subscription limit (500; free) of MyHeritage. This I did not realize, and it’s not very prominent on the site. The site gave me the option to upgrade to a Silver Subscription (2,500 individuals; $3.95/month billed annually; i.e., $48.00) or a Gold Subscription (unlimited; $9.95/month billed annually; $120.000 or a Platinum Subscription (also unlimited individuals, but with 2000 MB storage; $14.95/month, billed annually–you do the math!).
None of those options seemed palatable to me, so I decided to delete the large database. I’d take it down to the 500 size which is all my cousin needed from me anyway. Except I couldn’t find any way to delete it. I seemed to have recalled seeing a “Manage Tree” button earlier, but I couldn’t find it now! The site map does not mention deleting trees; however, the help FAQs discuss deleting entire sites. I did not want to delete the entire site, just the too big tree! After an hour of frustration, I found a link that said “LIVE CHAT.” So I clicked there to find out that it’s not live chat–it’s email! But I wrote my problem anyway. “Live Chat” is really “Comatose Chat.” It took 81 hours to get a reply!
While I was waiting for a reply, I changed the privacy settings on my site to “Private” so non-members could see none of it. Before I heard back from MyHeritage, I got an email from someone I’d never heard of inquiring about a surname in my database! I checked the privacy settings to discover that they had been set back to “Mixed”!
Well, I finally heard from MyHeritage tech support and everything is fixed now.
I willl say that there are some positive aspects of MyHeritage. The fact that a family site can be created and family members or others invited to become members of the site (for free) is good. The setup of the family trees in a 3-D sort of format is cool. The SmartMatches feature isn’t as smart as one might wish, but it’s pretty good. The integration between Family Tree Builder and the Web is good.
MyHeritage won’t aid the serious researcher very much, but it is a good place to display one’s work and make it available to families. It would be a good tool to get younger folks interested in genealogy.
So all is forgiven!
GeneaBlogie