Just as we get Record Matches for Archives.com, we should get notification of Facebook matches. This would make it easier to send an invitation to join the tree.
Date
Votes
5 comments
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Eric Randol Schoenberg, Geni Curator Just noticed that Ancestry allows you to pair up your Facebook relatives with their profiles on the family tree. Wish Geni could alos be ahead of the curve on this.
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Benjamin Christopher Fernandez Dear Geni Team,
I have been looking up names of distant family members from my geni tree on facebook, and I have managed to find dozens of distant relatives, who do not know of me, and have been trying to get them to join geni.com. However, facebook has put up a huge obstacle in this regards. I have elaborated below.
After searching for positive matches, I added their facebook email id (username@facebook.com) on the geni email invite box, however, not a single person has responded. This is probably since all emails from geni.com inviting users to claim their profile goes to the "other messages" in facebook inbox which a majority of facebook users are not aware of! So every email invitation goes unread. There is no other way to contact these relatives except through facebook. I also tried sending them friend requests on facebook, but no one will add an unknown person since I am a stranger. A few have replied back asking whether we knew each other on receiving the friend requests. Note that their replies landed in my 'other messages' since we are not added as friends. So I replied back to them in detail providing the relationship path link, but I am sure my reply went to their other messages and I have not heard back in weeks. So it appears that they have not had a chance to read the message at all !
It would be great if Geni can find a way to go around this obstacle by working with Facebook to help distant relatives who do not know of each other to connect. Most of my distant relatives are spread across the globe in many different countries and have long drifted apart. Many do not know of their full heritage. Is there a way Geni can cross reference matches of geni profiles on facebook and bring it to their notice and get them to join geni ? There are about 1 billion facebook users and 7 million geni users. The odds are that there are many unclaimed geni profiles of living people and those people may have a facebook account. It would be fantastic if Geni capitalises on this opportunity to increase its user base by working closely with Facebook.
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Peter Alan Dutton, Jr. I'm in the exact same boat as Benjamin - this would be a fantastic idea!
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Nicola Strambini I agree, it would be faster and a lot easier if we could get matches from relatives present in facebook friends and we could invite relatives to join building the tree through facebook instead of email
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Shoba Batheja Randy, that would be amazing. It would probably yield much better results trying to invite long lost or distant relatives to join the tree versus sending them a message on facebook which they may or may not read, and probably would not respond to anyway.
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