Back in early 2009 when I hadn’t gone to Parsons yet, Facebook was just surpassing MySpace with unique visits in the US and Twitter was still only being used by its early adopters, I eagerly started a new project.

Mygeni was a new platform with a lot of promise. Playing in the Social Media environment but offering so much more it was packed with features. It had posts of different media types residing in different interests the user defines but all having the ability to overlap. All post were geo-tag enabled and could be browsed in text format or on an expanded map view. The system worked on a friendship basis like Facebook but the friendships were tiered and users could filter content based on that intimacy. There was a group section where you could build a brand with sections and sub sections, a community section where you could write proposals and have them voted on and then implemented, you could earn wishes (the platform's virtual currency) and a great little tool which allows you to let your friends know where you are (they can see the venue on a map) and for how long called drop anchor.

It was easy to see from the start that mygeni was taking on more than it can handle. The features were not integrated, the platform was way too complicated and the graphic design was completely unintuitive and impossible to understand. As with any creative brief, the problems were completely downplayed and the objectives unrealistically simplified. My role was to “play around with the colour scheme a bit and move away from gray and pink” and “create some cool icons we can use” and of course “round the corners because its too square”. I have a very specific design process and do lots of background research and visual inspiration before I actually design anything. Lot’s of questions started popping up regarding the inner workings of the system, which later determined the final look of all the new sections. So in early 2009 began an incredible journey that took 18 months and 3 serious design versions to get where we are today, is only now beginning. I am continually learning, not only about the online Social Media landscape and the essential equilibrium between front-end designer and developer, but the importance of getting to the core of a brief which is always deeply rooted in specific problems never minor cosmetic changes.

A year and a half ago, mygeni was ahead of its time. But as we see today in the platforms that are being used and the features they have “introduced”, mygeni is right on the money full of features that are now making real sense to the way people consumer their information and live their daily lives. Now, mygeni’s groups product is a well differentiated take on Facebook Pages, the drop anchor feature is extremely similar to Foursquare (the next hottest geo-tagging platform), the wishes feature (mygeni’s virtual currency) works similar to Facebook credits launched this April, and the upcoming Community section has the same thinking as refresheverything.com (Pepsi's first major online social media project which saw them cut their $30 million annual TV advertising budget to launch).