Today’s interview is with Matt McInerney of Gleamd. Gleamd is an interesting spin on social voting. Think of it as the marriage between between people search engines like Spock and community voting sites like Digg or Reddit. The product is currently in invite only BETA and may be the killer app that people search is looking for.

Matt McInerney

Gleamd

Tell us a little about yourself Matt,

I’m currently studying graphic design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I’ve been doing freelance web design for a few years now. I blog at pixelspread.com, where I’ll be blogging about Gleamd. Gleamd is my first real attempt at creating a web app/service. Right now the site is run just by me, so it’s kept me pretty busy recently.

I started http://thesh.info and http://enddrm.info. Neither are web apps, but you can check them out. The Shinfo was a project gather useless yet entertaining information. EndDRM is a directory for users attempting not to buy DRMed music.

A Little About Gleamd

Gleamd seems to be a combination of the people search engines like Spock and social voting services like Digg on the surface. Dig a little deeper for us and tell us a little about what separates this product from the pack.

I think Gleamd steps away from the pack by using the combination of voting and gathering information on people together. Having a large directory of people like Spock or Wikipedia is great, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, there aren’t too many great ways to browse to find something interesting.

By adding voting, Gleamd allows the user to share their two cents with the rest of the community. If everyone puts in their two cents, you start to see something worth looking at rising to the top. Gleamd has only been up for a short while, but I’ve already used it to find interesting people I probably would have never heard of otherwise.

Yea, my problem with Spock has always been relevance. I have used Spock and I have no idea what I’m actually supposed to looking for. Allowing the wisdom of the crowds to play a role would provide a substantially improvement over a pure directory,

Tweet Tweet

I happened upon your project on Twitter. Have you found that social media is a good promotional tool? What methods are you using to get the word out about the product?

I’ve found social media an unbelievable promotional tool. Microblogging specifically. I have a blog and a tumblelog that I posted about Gleamd on, but through Twitter and Pownce I was able to get immediate feedback from hundreds of people. I don’t think I could ask for a better
promotional tool. Besides the microblogging, checking Gleamd out to major blogs has beenvery helpful. The write up on Mashable got a lot of people to check us out. The Mashable article also made it on Digg, so that got us a lot of traffic too.

Building A Community

As a social network one of the biggest frustrations is how to build a community that uses the product productively. What steps are you taking to help build a vibrant community that does not abuse your service?

That is one of those things, that if you can kick it off right, you’ve got it, but if users don’t know how to do it right from the start, you’re done. We are working very hard to avoid abuse. We have a few moderators to catch spam, but that hasn’t been a big problem. We limit everyone to one post every 30 minutes. I think that gets users to think about the importance of the person they’re submitting before they do it, knowing that they can’t just submit three people in a row and then ditch the site. Another measure we’ve taken, is to ask people not to submit themselves. It avoids a lot of narcissism and exaggeration. You also can’t submit the same name twice.

The real strength of a social network is its initial users. A bad crop of initial testers and all the promotion and technology in the world won’t save the product.

The Burning Question

I try to ask all of the entrepreneurs that I interview this. As entrepreneurs, do you have any advice for people who have an idea but just don’t know where to start or how to get it off the ground?

Just go ahead and do it. If you really think you’ve got a good idea, you can find a way to implement it. I got Gleamd off the ground in 2 days, and I’m so glad I just put the pedal to the metal and got it done.

Thanks for sitting down with us Matt, best of luck with Gleamd!

Web 2.0 Roundup

If you want to contact Matt with any questions about Gleamd here is how. If you want an invitation, visit the site.

Matt McInerney

www.gleamd.com

support@gleamd.com

UPDATE: I have about 5 Gleamd Invites, drop me a line or leave a comment and I’ll get them too you.

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