Recommendations for MyHeritage to stay competitive.

6 Comments

Here is my top five recommendations for MyHeritage to continue to be competitve with Geni.com. These are not really in any priority order but more of what I would like to see and I believe as a whole so would a lot of other people.

1. Two way merging: I looked through the website and the forums and best I could see is that you can upload a gedcom to the website for other to edit. If I understand that correctly that would lead you to have two family tree's to manager. One on the FTB and one for the gedcom were others could make the changes. I understand that this is not an easy thing to do, because you will be merging in both directions, but I think that this will be a great tool if ever implemented.

2. Mobile App: I would like to seem them implementing a mobile app soon be it for Iphone, Android or any other mobile operating system. With the recent purchase of OSN which had a mobile app I am hoping they can use this as their basis for the app. I would love to be able to pull up my family tree on my cell phone to show to my family while we are not near a computer, or be able to post a picture of a family reunion right on the website from my phone.

3. Facebook Integration: I am hoping that I am calling this the right thing, but I would like the ability to have updates from MyHeritage to be published right from MyHeritage, without having to over to Facebook. I know a lot of other sites do this. While on this maybe even twitter integration would be nice sometimes.

4. Ancestry/Family Search Integration: I know they have their mega search, and smart matching, but I would like the ability to pull up census records, land deeds or others right from FTB or the website. If it had the ability to pull/see Ancestry Tree hints that would be an added bonus. I understand that all of this may not be feasible, but at least getting FTB or the website certified for FamilySearch would be outstanding.

5. Better Web UI: There is nothing wrong with the present UI, I just feel that it lacks the ease of use of other sites like Geni or ItsourTree (which they now own). Maybe they will be able to take the best parts from OSN and MyHeritage sites and make a great looking UI for genealogy.

If anyone else has any other recommendations please post them here. If we get enough then maybe we can send them an email with the recommendations of the geneablogger community.

About Post Author

Xfaith

David has been an avid home genealogist for 15 years, researching surnames: DECKER, KONDRC, MACZEK, HOPFENGARTNER, PERUTZ, LEDERER, and more.

6 comments:

Daniel HorowitzFebruary 9, 2010 at 7:47 AM
Hi David,

I appreciate very much all your input. Some of them we are already working on, but can’t reveal them yet.

One, like the ability "to post a picture of a family reunion right on the website from my phone" is called Mobile upload, and we introduced this some months ago via personalized email addresses, recognizing which family site member is uploading an image.

Regarding GEDCOMs and FTB, the correct way to work, for now, is either via FTB (where you are the only one allowed to modify or post information – useful for those genealogists afraid that someone will make unauthorized changes), or directly on the web (GEDCOM or web-built) and decide if you want your relative(s) to collaborate with your research or not.

If you need any help or have additional suggestions, please contact me directly.
I hope we can meet on my next trip to the US - in April and June - when I’ll be lecturing in San Diego and other venues.

Best regards,
Daniel Horowitz
Genealogy and Translation Manager
daniel@MyHeritage.com
XfaithFebruary 9, 2010 at 7:58 AM
Thanks for your inputs Daniel.

I must have missed the mobile uploads on the website, this is good to know.

I see your points on the Web vs FTB, and they are valid, I already know from experience how you can have wrong information placed back in your main GEDCOM from family members making their own updates. But at the same time, you get lost sometimes on what is updated on the web version vs the FTB.

I guess maybe a happy medium, just not sure how that would work. Maybe a way to do a compare of web vs ftb to see what has been changed?

It would be great to meet you when you are out in San Diego please let me know.
Mary AnneFebruary 9, 2010 at 11:57 AM
Daniel - what about integration with Ancestry? They have all the records!
sebastienFebruary 11, 2010 at 7:46 AM
MyHeritage.com's Research page: http://www.myheritage.com/research ,
scours the Ancestry as one among 1500 other deep web databases.

This allows users to find information available in databases that don't charge the user to collect information. It also is connected to top paid databases so the user is able to find as much information as possible.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Sebastien

sebastien@myheritage.com
XfaithFebruary 11, 2010 at 10:06 PM
Thanks for your inputs Sebastien. I have tried to use the Research, but in my opinion it pulls up way to much information that its hard for me to look through it all.

I love the smart matching features of MyHeritage though.
matthiasApril 13, 2010 at 4:38 AM
I love the fetature smart matching! But I miss the ability to compare two FTP Projects/GEDCOMs an merge them like I can do it with smart matching (preview the tree, automerge, manual merge).