The good news is that this is complete! As 23andMe have failed to implement any of the extension’s features themselves all the original features have been restored:

• Auto-matching of surnames
• Addition of country flags
• MRCA estimate
• Calculation of cM shared
• Date pending communications were sent
• Age calculation

In addition I have made a number of cosmetic changes which I hope make the interface clearer – my intention being to make the important things stand out, which they don’t by default:

• Your total number of matches is now more prominent
• No more small grey text
• Profile pictures are made bigger
• Match names are made bigger and bold
• Predicted relationship is made bold
• The contact status column is colour-coded based on contact status
• You sometimes get empty boxes if users don’t enter surnames or places correctly, these are hidden

As always there has also been some minor bug fixes and optimisations behind-the-scenes. If you already have the extension you’ll get the new version (v1.8.0) automatically, if not head to the download page.

If you’ve already got the extension you’ll get the update automatically, if not head to the download page.

So now I can sit back and watch the records scroll by without getting RSI. Typically now that I’ve written it there’s no more records I want to find, but maybe it’ll save other people some time…

If you want to try it, you can get it from the Chrome Web Store.

This release extends the enhanced messaging functionality to Sent and Archived messages and adds the ability to archive messages in bulk.

A small change, but the extension now calculates age from birth year on user’s profile pages.

It may not look like much, but the messaging features represent many hours of work – I probably won’t be doing any more releases for a while! It seems to have been appreciated though, since there were 40% more downloads of the last release (343 in total) compared to the previous one.

As always, if you’ve already installed the extension you’ll get the update automatically, if not you can get it from the download page.

No massive surprises here! Of the 509 unique downloads of the extension since time began, 70.3% of those were from the US. Following some way behind is the UK at 6.1%.

If we break it down by continent, we see that North America accounts for 73.5% of downloads, with Europe some way behind with 19.6%. There were no downloads from Africa in my sample.

If we focus on Europe only, we can see that the most downloads were from the UK, followed by Germany. Scandinavia is quite well represented, the Southern Europe figures seem low.

So what can we surmise from this rather unscientific analysis of a small sample? Not a whole lot, except that the 23andMe customer base looks to still be dominated by the US, although Europe isn’t too far behind. Other populations are still very under-represented, which is a shame. Maybe all 23andMe need to do is translate their website into a few different languages – I wouldn’t much fancy trying to understand such a complicated subject in a language I don’t speak natively!

Edit: some downloads were accidentally excluded from my analysis. I’ve updated the charts and figures to include these – Australia is now represented!

You can also show up to 100 messages on a single page, if you so wish (the default is 10). You can search by subject, but not the content of messages I’m afraid. Be aware that it may take a while for the inbox to load if you have a lot of messages and/or a slow Internet connection, but once loaded searching, sorting and browsing from page-to-page is instant.

In other news, the extension now adds the number of shared cM to Relative Finder alongside the DNA percent shared. The estimated common ancestor range is now included in discovery view as well as list view.

I’ve also made some changes behind-the-scenes which should make the extension faster and reduce the size of the download.

If you already use the extension you’ll get this new version automatically, if not – what are you waiting for? Go to the download page now!

I found that there’s about 200 23andMe customers using the extension currently. I’m not sure how many I was expecting, but given the relatively low market share Google Chrome has (about 11% according to recent figures) I’m happy with 200!

The figures are slightly skewed as they depend on how long each release was available for before it was superseded – in some cases I did more than one release in the same day (!) so those ones have been excluded from the graph.

I believe the drop-off at the end is simply because 1.4.7 was only available for two weeks before I released the next version, while 1.4.5 was available for more than a month.

In case 23andMe were wondering how many people want them to improve their website, they now know – 200 customers can’t be wrong!

Edit: Updated with 1.5 stats

• The extension now checks your notification settings to ensure notification of new messages and sharing invitations is enabled (maybe some users don’t realise they have notifications disabled and are missing sharing requests… I know, wishful thinking)
• If you have multiple profiles and are posting to the community the extension tells you which profile you’re posting as by the message box

As always existing users should get the update automatically, if you’re a new user head to the download page.

The most noticeable change is that the common ancestor birth year estimate in Relative Finder is no longer based on the user’s year of birth. As it isn’t possible to keep this private with the new and improved profiles, I understand that many people will change this to something random. The calculation now assumes that the user is aged 40, but to make things a little more accurate I’ve added a ‘fuzz’ which extends the estimated range by 20 years either side.

Actually the most noticeable feature is that I made the text boxes bigger on the profile page, because they’re way too small

If you already have the extension you’ll get the update automatically. If not, head to the download page.

1. The ability to set your own generation length, to be used for the year range calculations in RF (currently a generation is considered to be 30 years).
2. When viewing a user’s profile page on 23andMe, identify users with whom you’re matched on services outside 23andMe (HIR Search, Jim McMillan’s database, etc).
3. For user’s with multiple profiles, the option to have a confirmation dialogue displayed each time you post in the community to confirm which profile you’re posting as. I hear it’s easy to change profiles accidentally, resulting in people posting as the wrong profile.
4. A new default introduction message for contacting relatives in RF, worded to encourage responses.
5. Option to enable Soundex for matching of surnames.

I can’t promise all these features will work out – sometimes things I want to add are simply too hard, but most of these should be fairly easy to implement. I will of course be keeping an eye on the community for any other good ideas that can be added to the extension.