I screwed up my sleep schedule tonight by taking a 2.5 hour nap when I got home after work today. My brain’s been locked in half-sleep/ zombie mode for a couple hours, so I did some work on the Family Tree, JK’s Journal, and played with 3-D Chat for the website.
My current family tree software
After hitting that particular brick wall, I decided to goof around with Google’s new software, Lively, which is 3-D avatar chat. I created an avatar and a room, and then linked to the room from a new PlanetJK page: The Lively Lounge. I doubt I’ll use it much, but it’s fun to play with. If anyone else is using Lively, feel free to join the room. Here’s my Lively Avatar:
Last but not least, I researched a plugin for JK’s Journal that will let me block access to the public but still allow me to test and redesign. I settled on Maintenance Mode by Michael Wörher, which worked out really well. Expect to see this a lot in the near future as I finally choose a new theme for the Journal and do some overhauling of the back-end:
Without further ado… G’night.
* Which shall remain unnamed in the hopes of thwarting the script kiddies
3 Comments
Thanks for coming to Geni to upload your famiy tree. We’d like to be sure you are successful and identified properly on your own family tree and that your Geni experience is a great one. Regarding your privacy concerns–if you haven’t already, check out the advanced privacy settings we offer to Geni.com users. You can see, change and customize your privacy by going to the ‘Settings’ link found at the top of every Geni page. At this page you can decide what privacy controls you wish to put in place for yourself and your tree. Addiltionallly you can read our privacy policy by clicking the ‘Privacy’ at the footer of a Geni.com page.
I’ve given you an email address you can use to contact us so that we can check the status of your GEDCOM request and answer any specific privacy questions you have.
Geni Team: First off, let me say I’m all crazy impressed that you guys would take the time to respond to my skepticism. Maybe I’m easy like that, but it seems to speak volumes about your willingness to address privacy concerns.
I liked the site enough to read 5 or 6 reviews and attempt an educated guess. Obviously I chose to give it a shot when I tried to upload my GEDCOM, but I’ll take advantage of the communications door you opened here and ask a few other questions to clarify things.
1) When family members sign up to add to the tree, whose privacy settings win during a conflict? In other words, if I configure my profile and the tree to be private and viewable by family only, can a family member who signs up accidentally or intentionally override the tree’s privacy settings? I’m not so worried about the intentional as I am the accidental.
2) Why are the privacy settings loose by default? I realize that the family tree mojo works best if multiple parties get involved, but the default options seem to give away more of the farm than necessary to meet that goal.
And thanks for the mention of the privacy settings options and privacy policy. I looked through both last night and was bolstered by your privacy policy, but I’m still cautious about sharing personal info for hundreds of family members. I replied to the e-mail and look forward to working out a solution for the GEDCOM upload.
~JK
Great to hear that you were happy to hear from us and that you’ve checked out our privacy policy.
Regarding possible conflicts: Each person that joins Geni controls his/her own privacy depending on what they are comfortable with–so if you’ve invited someone to join your Geni tree and they join then they can set their own privacy settings which will take precedent. This is for their own Profile and for those that they add. For example their Profile will be controlled by them. They can choose to make it editable or not–it’s their profile so it’s their choice.
As for deceased ‘Managed Profiles’ that you’ve added to your Geni tree (you’ll find this under ‘Settings’ and you can choose to make yourself the only person who can edit their profiles if you wish): You set the controls. If another family member joins and adds an additional deceased profile to your tree they will be the one to decide who can edit those profiles.
The customizable privacy settings that you see on Geni today evolved from customer suggestions and feedback. As with much of what we do here at Geni we listen to our users and add features and changes based on what we hear from them through emails, our forum and blogs like yours.
If you’d like to join in some lively discussions on these topics or start your own go to http://www.formum.geni.com. Members of the Geni Team visit the forum daily to see what our users are saying about our service and what their needs are. This has been a great tool in guiding the team’s direction for future enhancements.
As before I’ve given you a Geni email which you can use to communicate directly with us.