Hey Geni stuff and users,
Right after my second cousin added me to geni I became pretty active, added over 200 profiles and invited family and friends to join.
I have not used any paid account on geni and have managed to do quite alot with the free account.
Unfortunately, Geni's monetization efforts which earlier were annoying but liveable with became impossible to work with right now.
Take merges as example, previously, I could search a duplicate name, get all the names on the search results, open each profile, and do the merge. Now the other profile copy of the family member I already got on my tree is not even viewable for me. Only a sales/marketing propaganda comes up instead of the other duplicate profile.
Another example, I once found a cousin of a cousin of my step father, a great guy, we even met thanks to Geni when we traveled in his area. He is so remote family-wise that my step father laughed when I told the story and said it's way too far for him to know the remote cousin. Sounds excellent story which would help sell Geni further right? Not at all ... Now, a few years later, long after I stopped regularly logging in to Geni, my mom and step father went to see a cousin of his and told me about the visit. Remembering that nice cousin of a cousin from before, I wanted to see if he's connected through that cousin now visiting. Guess what - Geni decided now that a cousin of a cousin is too far and they won't show the full connection straight on top of the profile as they earlier did. I went see his tree - they still allow that since they recognize he's a remote family, though names there didn't show in full. However it is impossible to tell which way the connection to me goes from this graph. And if it was today with all those restrictions they have added, I would not have met that remote remote cousin.
Those are just examples, but the bottom line is that Geni kept removing free features, and being more and more aggressive with selling their pro accounts.
Do you think Facebook would have been that successful if free features were removed instead of added on a regular basis?
Geni unfortunately became impossible to manage due to over-aggressive monetization efforts. I wish they listen and revert all those wrong business steps.
In order to survive they should fix those as well as make sure they become the leading family graph management tool on Facebook.
