Geni – Doomed?

Geni.com was never one of my favourite sites. I am not a big fan of this type of website normally but since it was free, and I had some control over it I decided to give it a try and added a few generations of family on it.

Well on August 11th, 2011 Geni.comi announced that “Geni Pro Just Got a Whole Lot Better” (For those of you who don’t know, Geni Pro is the premium part of the site which users can pay to use additional upgraded features.) Unfortunately the Genealogy community doesn’t think this is such a great thing since Geni Pro subscribers now have full permission to add on to, edit, and merge profiles in the historical parts of the tree but limits Non-Pros from adding new profiles to the historical tree or merge profiles. It also limits Non-Pros from viewing trees other than those of “close relatives” and from entering relatives names past their third-great grandparents. This reminds me of the old OneWorldTree on Ancestry.com

I’m also wondering why I, as a Non-Pro subscriber never received any communication about this prior to reading it on other people’s blogs…

To read what some are saying about the changes you can view:

Genea-Musings
GeneaBloggers

But all is not lost. In a recent statement made on Geni.com, Geni will be allowing Public Access in several libraries and Centers so that people will have a chance to experience Pro Geni advantages.

Doomed? In my eyes it is. I like to research in the comfort of my own home – especially now that winter is coming and so it will be no use to me. Nor do I plan to pay for the privilege of putting my tree online where anyone can just go in and edit/add/merge to it so I *won’t* be participating. Besides, when I go to the library it is to conduct research. My time is valuable to me and I can’t afford to spend any additional time in a library for this. I might as well use a program such as PAF and upload my tree here or to my own website.

Now if I can only find a way to delete my tree of the site since it seems they have even made that difficult!