You may have heard that I haven’t had a job for years, the reasons for which I won’t get into. Regardless, I always had some difficulty being an employee at my first three jobs (one isn’t listed on my resumé), because I proved I could run a company with GetchaBooks, so it seemed like a disappointment to be a rank and file employee, but no one offered me VC funding or a management job that I know of. (If I am stuck in a time warp and you are offering GetchaBooks VC funding, I have moved on, but may be able to consider it.)
I’ve had some questions about whether we are living a few generations after a primitive agricultural society or the “car age” has been going on for eons (I don’t drive, can someone clue me in?). I’ve researched almost 4,000 ancestors not including a couple royal descents that bring thousands more, but sometimes it feels like the people in my database aren’t real and maybe I’m a clone. But I still continue to research my ancestors because it’s a great feeling to have an ancestor tree that is nearly complete surprisingly far back.
Today, I am announcing that I am going all in on MyGEDCOMs. The current bugs in the application will be fixed within a few days of work. I will consider moving to a Docker-based deployment strategy on Render.com so we can easily scale to meet potential traffic at launch instead of the current VPS on Digital Ocean. I will be soliciting WebTrees, The Next Generation, and former RootsWeb.com users from the email images they used to have displayed on the site. The application will remain open source, but we may add a non-commercial restriction on top of the current AGPL license.
While I am not 100% sure that the Singularity hasn’t happened and human software development is pointless, I believe that there is still room for new ideas in Internet genealogy, and we will try to offer some, like global statistically most common surnames by place, advanced geographic visualizations like an equal weight per generation ancestral cartogram, and a better global merged tree. While it is difficult to compete with the global collaborative tree sites (Geni, FamilySearch, and WikiTree) on data, I believe there is still room for a standard GEDCOM upload site where users control their own data, and we can find the right solution to importing data from other users trees or a global merged tree. MyGEDCOMs will be a premium product for customers who want features like bring-your-own-domain, Dropbox uploads of photos from your GEDCOM, automatic Amazon.com, Internet Archive, and WorldCat links for book sources, and of course our maps on any tree or report, which no other site currently offers. There will be an interactive tree view that uses GeneWeb’s default DAG and allows you to expand the tree to any individuals with a unique URL for each set of individuals. There will be Burke’s Peerage style layout for trees that span more than the page width eventually using Graphviz.js or CSS.
It’s difficult to tell whether I’m missing something that management knows about the current era, because new software would only be needed for a few more years before everything reaches an end state. I believe we can bring new features to the application for some time before running out of things to do. I will be looking for contributors as soon as possible, and if I am legally able to, employees. I may just post some bounties for features if we begin having revenue.
I believe MyGEDCOMs will be a positive force in Internet genealogy with my own tree as the demo tree, and a way for me to achieve my dream of making a living from owning an Internet company, sharing my ancestors with my cousins, and enabling other people to do the same.