Make sure you stay to the end, when I ask Sacks about a rumor floating around Silicon Valley that he tried to put a deal together with Yammer and Twitter back before the company even launched. Bonus: Sacks- as tactfully as possible- says what TechCrunch’s Yammer usage tells us about our company culture.

Noah Tutak, President of Geni, said that this additional language functionality is a result of the site’s international user base. Half of Geni’s traffic comes from outside of the U.S. But what’s even more compelling than Geni’s availability in additional languages is the technology that is helping to translate the site.

Geni’s engineers have developed a Ruby On Rails-based translation engine that crowdsources language translations of the site. Called tr8n, the technology allowed for Geni to be translated by a few dozen volunteers into seventeen languages in less than two weeks. Translators can vote on existing translations, or submit their own inline while browsing the site. The tr8n engine even takes into account the grammar rules of each language to provide accurate translations for any context.

Tr8n, which comes with 109 pre-configured languages, also shows you what percentage of the site is translated, has full support for right-to-left languages, and provides specialized character keyboards for specific languages with unique, local characters, such as Russian. David Sacks, founder and CEO of Geni, tells me that soon tr8n will be used to translate Yammer, Sacks’ other startup, and will eventually be licensed to other Ruby On Rails sites as a plugin for crowdsourced translations.

Facebook offers a Facebook Connect-enabled crowdsourced translation tool that helped the social network translate its site into more than 65 different languages. But Sacks maintains that tr8n is a more feature-rich option for translation.

Specifically, Sacks says that tr8n differentiates from Facebook’s tool by not requiring a user to have an account on another site. Tr8n also allows site operators own their translations and includes a more flexible syntax for translating complex phrases.

Additionally, Geni announced that the startup’s VP of product, Noah Tutak was promoted to President and VP of engineering Amos Elliston has been named Chief Technology Officer.

A couple of weeks ago Yammer CEO David Sacks came by the office to give us some news. Sacks, who is also the CEO of genealogy site Geni, also told me about a new product Geni is launching; – family tree posters.

There are two 16″ × 20″ versions – $30 for a printed poster, $120 for a canvas, framed poster. One of Geni’s key features is to allow the merging of family trees, so it’s easier to create one tree going back four generations. If you have pictures it makes the poster a really cool gift. I gave the one Sacks made for me to my parents and they love it (my father has diligently created our family tree on both sides of the family, with help from his sister).

Sacks also talked about Geni’s overall business. Over $1 million in revenue and he says they’ll be profitable within the year. The company has raised $16.5 million over three rounds.

The merger gives MyHeritage a lot of new features and a whopping combined 540 million profiles, 47 million active users and 13 million family trees. The companies have been quietly merging the sites together for the last few weeks, and all of OSN’s information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of about thirty minutes ago.

This was a big job because each profile has a lot of bits and pieces attached to it and there was only a 5% overlap in accounts. That may be a sign that MyHeritage wasn’t doing so hot in Europe, proving this was a smart deal.

MyHeritage has an algorithm that helps find family tree connections for users, so it should be interesting to see how this influx of European users expands existing users’ family trees in the coming weeks. “A huge amount of people in North America are going to discover unknown roots,” MyHeritage founder Gilad Japhet says.

I visited Japhet the last time I was in Israel  and we chatted about the merger over the weekend. He wouldn’t disclose whether the deal was stock or cash or how much he paid, but it was clear that he was eying OSN for some time. “It was founded by two very talented individuals, and I knew from their track record they were serial entrepreneurs,” he says. “I thought from the start they wouldn’t have the patience to run this for ten years, maybe they’d be willing to merge their vision with ours. Eventually that theory proved correct.”

Japhet is not playing around. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone whose spent time in Israel if I tell you he’s intense, competitive, and relentlessly determined. 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. Last Saturday when Japhet and I talked, 1 million photos had already been uploaded to the site that day. “There is a clear need for families to have a secure and private place online to share memories, stay in touch and preserve their history,” says Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures and a MyHeritage board member. “I think the further Facebook opens up to the real-time web and defaults to public, the greater this need will become.”

Indeed privacy is a big issue to Japhet, even if it means slower growth. Unlike competing sites, if you chose to be public on MyHeritage, only your information goes public, not the details of your siblings, nieces, nephews and other members of your family tree.

This is less about beating other genealogy sites now and more about MyHeritage making up the third leg of the social networking stool, which is still largely up for grabs. Facebook has won on friends, LinkedIn has won on professional and MyHeritage is seeking to win on family. It took LinkedIn far longer to get to critical mass because professional relationships were less viral and sexy, and my guess is family relationships may take even longer. Indeed, MyHeritage started six years ago and is still largely unknown in the high-brow Valley circles.

But eventually it’s a huge opportunity, and Japhet is patient. His site has those same endorphin-rush elements of discovery and connection that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have. But here’s kicker—it has to be international to work because the US, Israel, and much of the world are essentially young nations with huge immigrant melting pots communities. You can’t trace distant cousins too far back, if you’re only going to focus on the US. And you only get those moments of true “holy-shit!” joy when other trees start connecting to yours and you discover whole new branches. If you’re just entering your known-relatives, it’s not too exciting.

Don’t expect this to be MyHeritage’s last acquisition. Japhet borderline stalks competitors. He can rattle off any stat from Ancestry.com’s public filings and viewed Geni’s 2007 launch as a huge wake up call for better UI and features. Japhet knew a lot about genealogy, but MyHeritage was a wonky, tech-heavy download before Geni’s beautifully simple site launched—and got a whopping $100 million valuation. Later, when Japhet saw OSN’s faster growth in Europe, he knew he had to have them.

Japhet says OSN didn’t have a deep understanding of genealogy, but they killed it on features, many of which MyHeritage will be keeping. Among other things OSN had an iPhone app, operated in 14 different languages, and offered poster printing of family trees in any size. “There’s nothing like German engineering,” Japhet says. [Update: Originally I wrote "40 languages" which is what I heard via our Skype connection.]

Japhet’s favorite feature is the coat of arms. If you don’t have one, you can create your own, and it appears on all your pages—you can even order merchandise bearing your new coat of arms. The site will soon allow you to register it with the coat of arms authorities– a big hit with its European audience.  When designing his own coat of arms, Japhet was a bit put off by the dragons and swords and instead asked an engineer to design some chess pieces. Yep, tech geeks are the same in every country.

Is all of this making MyHeritage a target for someone like Ancestry.com? “I’d like to say we’re too expensive for them,” Japhet said. MyHeritage has raised $24 million to date and started to focus on revenues last year. It’s profitable now, making money through ecommerce transactions and premium services. MyHeritage has been funded by some of the strongest investors in Europe including Index and Accel.

That’s ultimately the thing I find most exciting about Japhet and MyHeritage—he wants to build a billion dollar business, and he’s not put off by how long that will take or by the rap that Israelis are great at enterprise, but bad at the consumer Internet. Japhet himself wasn’t naturally great at it, but he’s benefited mightily from his competitors who were and moved quickly to compensate—whether it’s learning from them or buying them.

Update: Yammer is back! In a blog post the company explains that the issue was with a master switch.

Yammer, the Twitter-like short messaging service for business users, has been experiencing a prolonged period of downtime today due to DNS issues. The service first went down over 12 hours ago, was alive for a short period tonight, and then became unresponsive again a few hours ago. The issue is also affecting sister company Geni, who share the same DNS servers.

A look at the whois records for the domains shows that there are only two name servers assigned, and they are ns1.geni.com and ns2.geni.com – and they are both down. I wasn’t able to locate an IP address for the Yammer servers to test if the actual service is still there, but a query to the root servers shows that the IP addresses for the two name servers used by the domain are on the same netblock and are both down at the moment.

DNS is very fault tolerant, since it is possible to setup secondary servers that know where to find the answer to a query, and query responses are heavily cached all the way down to the local machine performing the lookup. There are a number of commercial services available that offer distributed DNS hosting along with advanced features, such as EasyDNS, who we use at Techcrunch (Disclosure: we use them).

We use and love Yammer at Techcrunch, and the product won the 2008 Techcrunch50 conference. We have become very accustomed to using Yammer as a replacement for a lot of internal email and Skype group chat, so we are almost lost at the moment without it. We can definitely sympathize with other Yammer users flooding Twitter with questions and complaints (Yammer has been very responsive to queries over Twitter, although has not confirmed a firm ETA on the service being back up).

Yammer is an enterprise service, being used my a number of corporations for internal communication. When Twitter goes down, we can moan about it and make do with not knowing what our friends are having for lunch. But when Yammer is down it has an effect on those businesses using it as a communication tool.

There are a number of emerging services taking aim at the corporate short-messaging market, least not Google with Wave and TC50 demopit winner Socialwok. For all of these services, factors such as availability and reliability are far more critical than with consumer oriented sites, and with the enterprise market these factors often take precedence over features or nice design.

PEHub has reported a handful of new unannounced funding rounds based on recent SEC filings. Included among them are ancestry site Geni, which raised $5 million in Series C funding with investors including Charles River Ventures and Founders Fund. Geni’s team, which includes former PayPal exec David Sacks, is also behind TechCrunch50 winner Yammer, a Twitter-like service for businesses. We’ve reached out to Geni to confirm the news and will update this post once we do.

Update: Sacks has confirmed that Geni raised the $5 million round, and has also told us that Yammer has raised a $5 million Series A round.

Also included in the report is GoodGuide’s Series A round of $3.73 million with investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and New Enterprise Associates. GoodGuide, another TechCrunch50 company, is building a database of consumer products that gauges how ‘good’ they are with respect to safety, the environment, and the community. The news was confirmed by VentureBeat.

Other investments reported include a $6 million round for Return Path with investors including Union Square Ventures, Mobius Venture Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Western Technology Investments. For more, check out the PEHub story.

CEO David Sacks says there are now 10,000 networks and 50,000 users just one week in. Yammer’s business model is to let people use the service for free, spreading it throughout the enterprise. When and if a company wants to take administrative control over the account, Yammer charges $1/user/month. Administrators can set access controls, such as IP controls and SSL.

The company already allows interaction with the service via the site, an AIR client, iPhone, Blackberry, IM, SMS and email. This evening they’ve also launched an API to allow third party developers to build Yammer into their applications.

First up is Seesmic, which is simultaneously announcing that they’re buildiing Yammer support into their Twhirl desktop client. Twhirl is used today to access the Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic video chat services. Integration should be completed in the coming weeks. (Disclosure: I’m an investor in Seesmic)

We signed up to Yammer just after the TechCrunch50 conference last week. Nearly everyone is using it regularly now. We have 14 members and 161 total messages.

The Yammer demo video from TechCrunch50 is here.

The site has grown from 180 million profiles a year ago to 260 million today, they say. Registered users have also grown, from 17 million to 25 million. Compare that to almost 2 million users for Geni. 230 million photos have been uploaded to the site, which is available in 25 languages and has 5 million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more language will be released this month.

Investors have certainly noticed MyHeritage’s stellar growth. The company has raised a new round of funding – $15 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures and joined by current investor Accel Partners. That brings their total capital raised to $24 million.

New Features – Recognize Those Faces

MyHeritage’s facial recognition, which works a little like recent Picasa enhancements, lets you train the service by tagging a few photos of an individual. MyHeritage then starts to auto-tag other photos that you upload of that person, too. Users don’t have to upload photos directly, either. They can sync from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, etc. And once the photos are properly tagged with people’s names, MyHeritage will re-sync them back to the original services.

Just to reiterate that, MyHeritage has created a heck of a tool to let users auto-tag photos with people’s names on the services they already use.

And the biggest family tree at Geni now has over 680,000 profiles and 40,000 users (profiles include deceased family members).

A key feature driving big trees is the ability to merge smaller ones, which can create a snowball effect. Prior to the release of the merge feature, Geni’s largest tree was just 35,000 profiles.

Geni now allows users to upload photos and videos, arrange family calendars, etc. As we said over a year ago, the site is clearly aiming to be the family-centered social network:

Geni won’t be successful if all they can do is get people to add themselves and a couple of relatives and then rarely revisit the site. They want viral growth and the kind of big page view numbers that the large social networks see – up to 20 per day per visitor. To get there they’re adding a few proven features to the site. And by adding these features, they are essentially creating a social network with the family, as well as family friends, as the core. There’s a direct analogy to facebook – instead of colleges and universities, Geni is focusing on family units.

Dow Jones VentureSource put out some data on Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. earlier this week that I’ve put together into these charts. The first one above shows how much money has been invested in Web 2.0 startups so far this decade. In 2007, venture capital poured into Web 2.0 companies at a record pace—$1.34 billion. That was up 88 percent from the $716 million invested in 2006.

But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. (The amounts charted above, starting with 2001, are $68 million, $29 million, $79 million, $232 million, $716 million, and $1.343 billion)

The growth in the number of deals is also slowing. Last year, there were 178 Web 2.0 deals in the U.S. That was up only 25 percent, after doubling every year for the previous four years. And in Silicon Valley last year, the number of deals actually dropped from 74 to 69.

In 2007, the median deal size was $5 million, up 22 percent. And the median pre-money valuation was $10 million, up 66 percent (from $6 million in 2006). Both deal size and valuation for Web 2.0 companies remained below the average VC deal across all industries ($7.6 million and $16 million, respectively)

Here is a list of some of the biggest venture financings of 2007, including ones for Facebook, Ning, Zillow, Veoh, MyStrands, and Hi5. Slide’s $50 million isn’t included because that was in 2008. Hey, maybe things haven’t peaked after all.

Verwandt was originally a clone of Geni.com (although Geni has evolved significantly since then and now has photos, a family news feed, etc.) and launched six months after. Despite releasing later, Verwandt claims to have grown at a faster rate than Geni, adding one million family trees and 9.5 million profiles in the first five months compared to Geni’s 4.5 million after launch. Verwandt now says they have over 1.4 million families and 16 million profiles. Germany makes up about a third of their traffic.

The tremendous growth can at least in part be attributed to the site’s availability in multiple languages. Verwandt is available to users in German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English. Verwandt also has Gedcom import/export, which allows family tree data to be moved around to different applications. A lot of Verwandt’s growth has likely come from Gedcom import data. CEO Sven Schmidt says imports make up less than 5% of their profiles. Geni has export capabilities now, import is coming soon.

Today they will announce a second fund, Founders Fund II. It’s much larger – $220 million. And unlike the first fund, the money comes mostly from outside investors. The new fund will allow Founders Fund to make 15-20 new investments, including pro-rata investments in follow on rounds.

A couple of investments have been made out of the new fund, they say, but have not yet been disclosed.

Founders Fund partners have deep connections in Silicon Valley, which help with deal flow (Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal, Ken Howery, founder and former CFO of PayPal, Luke Nosek, founder and former Vice President of PayPal and Sean Parker, founder and former CEO or President of Napster, Plaxo and Facebook). But they also approach deals differently than most other funds.

Sean Parker said today in a phone interview that a glut in venture capital, combined with reduced capital needs of most startups, has led to a shift in balance of power between entrepreneurs and VCs. Founders Fund recognizes that shift and has evolved does deals a little differently because of it. For example, they invented and promote the issuance of a special class of stock, called Series FF, which allows entrepreneurs to take money off the table much earlier in their company’s lifecycle. They also allow significantly more liberal voting rights to founder board members than many other funds. See this article in the SF Chronicle earlier this year for more on how they do business.

In August the inevitable German clone launched. The clone, called Verwandt.de is a near carbon copy of Geni.

But unlike most clones, which never do as well as the original application, Verwandt is growing at nearly twice the rate that Geni is. In Verwandt’s first five months, CEO Sven Schmidt says they have spread to six languages (German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English). One million family trees and 9.5 million profiles have been created (4.5 million more profiles than Geni’s first five months).

They’ve cannibalized a lot of early adopters in the Europe and South America with strong execution in localized markets and languages. Verwandt is even taking on Geni on its home turf. They’ve just launched in the U.S. under the domain ItsOurTree. Same design, different words.

Geni’s simple Flash interface was an innovation among genealogical sites (see our coverage of established competitors like MyHeritage and Ancestry.com). Verwandt is nothing more than a blatant rip of of Geni. But they are executing perfectly, and those 9.5 million user profiles are likely gone for Geni forever. Verwandt’s success means other clones will pop up even quicker than befoe. And that means startups need to think about international strategies right at the start, perhaps even before launch and before the application is proven.

They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.

In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.

But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.

And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.

The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.

It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.

The Generations Network competes with a number of new Internet startups that we’ve recently covered. Its Ancestry.com site competes with Geni and MyHeritage. MyFamily.com competes with Story Of My Life, Our Story and others.

Geni’s last round of financing valued the company at $100 million. But none of those competing sites, or even all of those sites aggregated, have caused any financial pain yet for The Generations Network. The company is pulling in $150 million or so in yearly revenue and is hugely profitable according to our source.

This is a liquidity event for many or most of TGN’s shareholders, although it is apparently not a complete buyout. Employees and possibly some outside shareholders still have equity in the entity, which is almost certainly preparing for an IPO or other larger liquidity event.

The most recent Comscore data says TGN had 8.2 million unique worldwide visitors in August. They’ve raised $95 million to date, although the last round of financing was closed in 2001.

The company is not responding to requests for comment.

Israeli startup MyHeritage was a bit of a sleeping giant. Until newcomer Geni came along and shook up the genealogy world with its slick new viral family tree application. Geni quickly reached 5 million people profiles and a monster $100 million valuation just a few months after launching.

MyHeritage has been around since 2005. They’ve quietly raised $9 million in venture capital (about half from Accel and half from two angel investors, Yuval Rakavy and Aviv Raiz). Until recently MyHeritage required users to upload family genealogy information from desktop based software. The information was viewable online but no changes could be made. An unwieldy system, but they still managed to gather 150,000 family trees with 180 million people profiles from 17.2 million users. 150,000 new profiles are added daily. That dwarfs Geni, although MyHeritage had a long head start.

A couple of weeks ago MyHeritage unveiled a number of fundamental architectural changes to their service. They’ve taken the best features of Geni and married them to the stuff at My Heritage that has worked over the past couple of years.

Users can now upload data (name, email, born/died dates, photos, etc.) directly on the MyHeritage website in addition to the client, choosing from17 different languages. The user interface, which like Geni is in Flash, shows a couple of different views to quickly move around a family tree. Over 100 million photos have been uploaded to the site, and users can tag faces with names an attach them to user profiles.

That isn’t all MyHeritage is up to, though. They acquired Pearl Street Software late last year. That acquisition brought matching technology to the company which allows the service to compare family trees to find overlap – even if names are spelled differently or the basic data is somewhat off (slightly different birth or death dates, for example). They are just beginning to roll out the matching service, but they expect to see a lot of overlap between family trees. If both sides agree, the trees can be merged at appropriate places.

MyHeritage hopes, like Geni, to one day have much of the world’s genealogy mapped online. Given that 1 billion people are online today, MyHeritage’s 180 million people profiles is a good starts towards reaching that goal. They eventually hope to have 3 billion profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any two people in the world is just a mouse click away.

It’s a grand vision, but one that is likely to be achieved someday by MyHeritage or one of their competitors.

As an aside, MyHeritage also has a robust (and free) genealogy metasearch engine that taps into 1200 genealogy databases around the world.

The addition of the team and products put the company in a better position to deal with upstart Geni, which announced over 5 million profiles in 5 months in July. They’ve also been getting a great deal of the press. However, Geni still has a long way to go when taking on the established ancestry industry. MyHeritage has a large lead on the site with over 10 million registered users of their site. Ancestry.com, the leading genealogy site, has added 5.6 million people to their family trees this week.

As a sign of the competition, MyHeritage will now be making all the Pearl Street Software free.

Update: This acquisition actually took place in December 2006 but was not announced until now. Integrtation been ongoing since that time.

The latest German clone, Verwandt, means “related” in English. Its design and functionality is very similar to its U.S. counterpart, Geni. In fact it goes well beyond similar – Verwandt is a Geni clone dressed up in some cuddlier graphics. It uses the same layout and quick sign-up flash-based registration form as the U.S. site. They’ve also copied the family tree navigation and profile pages. Take a look below to judge the similarities for yourself.

The motivation and business process is clear: 1) Find a proven concept in the U.S. or elsewhere, 2) Clone the service, 3) Profit. And they have been profiting off these clones quite a bit. The Samwer Brothers have invested in Alando.de (eBay clone sold to eBay) and Studi.vz (Facebook clone sold for $100 million). They’re also investors in Frazr. See Gregor’s post for a longer list of clones. Certainly other countries, including the U.S., engage in their fair share of cloning as well. However, the flood of clones coming from Germany suggests an unwelcome trend.

Verwandt seems to be cloning some of Geni’s success as well. They have over 1.5 million profiles in under 2 months of operation, compared to Geni’s 5 million. They’ve also secured an undisclosed level of financing, most certainly helped by Geni’s $100 million valuation.

There’s a lot of great innovation going on outside the U.S., but this rip and flip mentality may prove short-sighted as the real McCoys continue to innovate and internationalize, and solid German startups like Xing are forgotten in the controversy.

This is not the number of registered users (Geni had 100,000 when reporting 2 million profiles), but rather the number of people put into Geni family trees. A user, after adding themselves, begins to add other people. If you include an email, that user is notified of the existence of the tree and can choose to sign up or not. Every non-deceased person who’s added, therefore, is a potential Geni user. That single viral component to the service will ensure orders of magnitude greater growth compared to established competitors like ancestry.com.

Geni has raised a total of $11.5 million in capital – the last round was $10 million on a $100 million valuation. They continue to add features that have proven to be successful at creating growth at Facebook and other social networks, suggesting that valuation may not be as crazy as it seems at first blush.

At launch, Geni appeared to be like many other “family tree” websites, just with a better looking and easier to use (Flash) interface. The site is extremely viral. When I first created my account I added my mother and father, along with their emails. They added more family members, who added yet others. Seven weeks after launch there were 126 people in my Geni family tree. Today, Today, after 15 weeks or so, there are 305 people in my family tree. All but three, myself included, were added by others.

Geni, The (Family) Social Network

Geni won’t be successful if all they can do is get people to add themselves and a couple of relatives and then rarely revisit the site. They want viral growth and the kind of big page view numbers that the large social networks see – up to 20 per day per visitor. To get there they’re adding a few proven features to the site. And by adding these features, they are essentially creating a social network with the family, as well as family friends, as the core. There’s a direct analogy to facebook – instead of colleges and universities, Geni is focusing on family units.

New features include:

• photo uploading and sharing
• map view of people in your tree by birthplace or current location
• calendar of upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and other family events
• Add family friends as “friends of your family tree”
• Gedcom export – export your tree in the standard genealogy file format

All of these features will incentivize users to use the site frequently, even daily. The photo sharing feature is modeled on Facebook – users can upload photos and they are then available to everyone in the family tree. Photos can also be tagged with the names of anyone in the tree or any family friends. Those pictures will then appear in the profile of those users. That means people’s profiles get built out even without their active participation.

Geni also has more features planned in the near future. These include Gedcom imports, family tree mergers, and an internal messaging system.

Geni will never have the sex appeal of MySpace of Facebook, but they may finally crack the older demographic and get them participating actively in social networking. If they can become the (or one of the) de facto ways that people share family experiences like weddings, funerals, anniversaries and birthdays, it could become an important part of people’s online life. If that happens, the $100 million valuation will look like a steal.

Our previous coverage of Geni is here.