I noticed today that GEDmatch is trying to raise funds to cover the cost of their web services. What are those services? Basically if you get raw data back from direct-to-consumer genotyping firms GEDmatch allows you to run further analytics. You can do some of these yourself…but most people aren’t going to know how to convert their files into pedigree format and use PLINK. As genotype data becomes more and more common there’ll be more need for analytic services like GEDmatch, whether for profit or for fun.
One can imagine a near future where much of the work can be offloaded to desktop applications (e.g., Promethease does this for traits and diseases). But the problem is that there is greater returns to the analysis when you aggregate the source data into huge agglomerations, and if people are doing their own analyses on their own systems that’s not going to happen (the GWAS information in Promethease uses aggregated information implicitly with the studies they rely on). This is why GEDmatch and openSNP are important.
In any case, if you have used GEDmatch and wish to give, this would be a good time.