There seems to be an endless supply of social networking sites launching daily onto the Internet, all-trying to capture people to create content. Some are successful, like MySpace, which have millions of users, while others like Twitter just seem to fall by the way side.

Onto the scene comes Gleamd, social networking meets Digg meets celebrities, all with a shiny Web 2.0 name lacking a vowel. The concept, at least what I can tell from the press release as there is no about page, is that users add famous and not so famous people to the site with a snippet of information about them and then vote them to the top or front page or something. The problem I’m seeing is that none of the information on these people is anything original, for the most part it can all be found on the Wikipedia, and the vote system ala Digg is getting played out. It works very well on Digg, but even there it has been proven to be somewhat easy to manipulate.

My guess is that this site is trying to bring awareness or popularity to stars as they rise and gain them more fans while at the same time introducing them to the mass media. The problem is that the site is almost too dynamic, users can, in my opinion, manipulate it entirely too easily. It wouldn’t be hard for a group of users to push any star they wanted to the front page daily while leaving horrible comments for other stars and pushing them to the bottom of the pile.

From a user standpoint, the site is lacking in a few areas, most noticeably a search feature. Other things that should be included are some form of about pages to help describe what exactly the site is along with a contact page. Additionally, there are no RSS feeds for anything on the site, somewhat disappointing. There is a positive note about the site, it is clean and laid out very well, the colors work, although a bit boring and it doesn’t seem to be monotized, as in there are no ads on it. This leads me to think one of two things could be in the works. First, they are trying to actually build a buzz and content prior to making money, usually a good thing, or, sadly they may be building the entire site, content and user base for the sole purpose of selling it in the rising Web 2.0 bubble.

My personal opinion, I won’t be visiting the site again, it has no real value to me as a user, and I’ll stick to using Wikipedia for finding information on people.

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