This morning I received an email from my cousin that I was added to his family tree on a service called Geni. It said it was private and I was intrigued so I clicked on the link. It showed a segment of my family in Flash and immediately satisfied me in multiple ways. It was personal, accurate, well designed and had a bunch of actions I could click on. I didn’t need any training. It presented me with a modal asking for my relations. (Siblings, wife, children, etc).
I added in those people and realized that I had just emailed them with the same email I got from my cousin. Wow! That was the easiest socialization in an application I have ever seen. It was better than Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter. It was so streamlined. In the morning, there were just a handful of connections in the tree. Now there are 43 46 people and growing. It’s fascinating. My aunt’s family tree goes back to 1791!
There is obviously a ton of functionality here and I have barely scratch the surface. However, I have to give A+ marks to Geni for thinking through the completely interaction design including multi-user editing. I never heard of this thing 12 hours ago, but I predict alot of people will hear of it pretty quickly.
Whatya think?