Mygeni is an online platform that creates and organizes a stream of content based on your friends’ knowledge. That means every time you log in you get to see all the interesting things your friends have created or shared that are interesting to you. It does this through posts. When you think of posts think of your Facebook news stream or your Twitter page full of status updates, links, photo albums, videos or articles coming through one under the other.

Posts

There are 5 types of posts in mygeni: article, weblink, photo album, video, music track.

The mygeni experience is based on a different content streams within each of your interests. I am viewing my Branding and Design interest here and browsing through different posts that my friends have created which are relevant to Branding and/or Design.

By clicking on the red number under the icons of the creation dock, I can easily revisit all the posts within that particular media type (eg. weblink) that I began creating but did not complete. Similar to "drafts" in my email inbox I can store content which I know I want to revisit at a later stage.

Interests

Your “content stream” is the area where you view all the content that your friends have created based on your interests. All posts reside in your defined interests. The heart of your content stream is your interest’s keywords. Just like each Flickr image is most powerful when described by tags, each interest has user-defined keywords (that would be you telling mygeni what your interest is about) that specifically describe the interest. All posts that share those keywords will automatically be fed into that interest. But how do posts get keywords you ask? The back end is easy to understand: every time I want to post something mygeni asks me to “target” my post into one of my interests. This means I have to tell mygeni into which interest this post needs to live (it can live in more than one interest). Once I publish the post mygeni automatically assigns it all the keywords of all the interests I “targeted” it to. Think of this as sticking a badge on each post so everyone knows where it belongs. Depending on how well I have described my interests using keywords, the content item I just posted is well described and knows into which of my friends’ interests to be displayed.

I can easily edit all my interests at once, tweak their keywords so I can constantly describe them better, merge them with other interests and of course, delete them if necessary.

I create an interest Branding and Design. I assign it lots of keywords describing what this interest is about including branding, brand architecture, brand management, strategy of how brands work, graphic design, illustration and european interior design. If any one of my friends create a post and “target” it to any one of their interests that share one or more of these keywords, I will see their post when viewing my Branding and Design content stream. Furthermore, if I create a post entitled Brands of the Future and “target” that post to my Branding and Design interest (I’m putting a Branding and Design badge on my post), the post will automatically adopt the Branding and Design’s keywords. Therefore, just like I see all posts from my friends of which we share common interest keywords, my friend Steve will now be able to see my Brands of the Future post in his interest entitled Good Design from around the World because his interest was also described by the keyword branding and design among other keywords.

Filters

As I mentioned earlier, filtering information effectively and getting to what you need in the least amount of time has become one of the most important tasks online. Mygeni provides the user with two filtering features: filtering friends and filtering post types.

When adding or editing friends you are prompted to assign them an intimacy level, namely tight, close or social. This setting is only visible to you and gives you the power to filter content items according the intimacy you share with your friends. This of course is directly linked to credibility as your tightest friends would be the most trustworthy sources of information while your social friends could be good creators of an array of information but not necessarily credible sources. You can further filter which content items you see by selecting the media type (tag, article, weblink, photo album, video, music track), the star rating and its location if one was submitted.

I can view 4 and 5 star video posts from my tight friends who’s current location is New York (that is 8 people from 38 tight and 1,024 total friends) in my Branding and Design interest and watch the Ted talk Celest posted in approximately 5 seconds. Similarly I can browse content from all my friends in my Restaurants & Cool Places to Go interest on a map zoomed into Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.