MyGenius.co.za
I was referred to MyGenius after writing an article on social networking for the Citizen last Friday.
It’s not the first SA-specific social networking site. MyCircle (no relation) has been around for some time now but has never really exploded on the same scale as US counterparts Friendster and Facebook.
MyGenius also claims to offer more than my fav networking app LinkedIn. I met with the MyGenius guys this morning to find out more about the service and possible applications for companies. They’re offering a ‘network within a network’ type functionality – a group of connected individuals sharing information and resources – networked to the wider community by invitation only.
One thing I enjoy about MyGenius is how they’ve integrated with Skype and MSN. However, they need to do this with more web services and tools i.e. flickr, del.icio.us and RSS and XML feeds. Today the most exciting web apps are NOT those that offer the most functionality – instead it is those that AGGREGATE the functionality of existing services. Good examples of these are the Ajax start pages (Pageflakes, Netvibes, etc.) and new services like Multiply. It’s hard to provide better photo sharing than flickr, video sharing better than GooTube YouTube and blogging functionality better than WordPress or TypePad. So the answer in not reinventing the wheel, but rather bringing all the services to one place. MyGenius can differentiate itself in this way.
Popularity: 2% [?]
another company I’m watching is: http://broadbandmechanics.com , they’re developing peopleaggregator.com which seems quite nifty, though I’m seeing daily how drupal can handle all of this … YAY Drupal :)
thx for the reminder.. saw they had an ad in one of the in-flight mags a few months back (? think), but forgot because they didn’t come into my online radar till now
Have you joined mygenius? Just signed up and within 30 minutes have received 7 emails with all sorts of admin / notifications etc. V annoying. I am going to see if I can turn that off, and if not will deregister. I hate things that clog up my inbox.
Me again. Just wanted to say that I found out you can select not to receive email notifications from mygenius. The default is to receive notifications and I just had to deselect option. Easy. Much better for me.