TechCrunch has a story on a Geni clone that launched recently that is quickly becoming more popular than Geni itself. The new site is available online at itsourtree.com for those of us who speak English, translated from the original site in German.

Its interesting to note the slant that TechCrunch took for this story and the response from the Sven Schmid, the co-founder of Verwandt.de. Nick Gonzalez was quick to mention the fact that they appear to have cloned the UI from Geni, and a few of commenters were pretty harsh on Sven's company. But I think Sven is bang on when he says in his comments "It is our belief it is all about execution. We must deliver a compelling user experience."

That's business these days on the Internet. If you have a successful idea, you can be sure that dozens of companies will try and copy you. With frameworks available to rapidly develop applications, with services from Amazon so your data and site is always available, its harder than ever to maintain a competitive edge. In the past the competitive edge in software came from proprietary formats. These days its from the user experience, and the resulting network effects of more visitors. Which I think is what Sven is saying.

TechCrunch has the story of a new startup, Geni, which uses Flash to manage your family tree. You start by adding yourself, then move to add your other family members: mom, dad, brothers, sisters, husband / wife etc... As you go, you have the option of inviting them to fill in more of their family tree, expanding your own family tree without making you do all the work. I've started mine, we'll see if my mom and dad continue filling in the rest of it.

I've posted other stories on using Flash for visualization of information, and this is no different. In this case, its displaying relations between human beings. Yes, we all know how great Flash is for online audio (blog post coming about that soon) and online video (blog post coming about that soon too), but its quickly geting a reputation as a great tool for visualization of data. (Digg Labs has two great examples showcasing the use of Flash to display data from Digg: Stack and Swarm.)

I'm interested in knowing how they're going to relate all these people to one another... Maybe email addresses, I guess, but I know a lot of people who have multiple email addresses. In any event, a cool site to check out and play around with for a few minutes.