Find a Good Plumber with GemShare
Everybody has a favorite Italian or Chinese restaurant. Everyone has an accountant or a plumber or a doctor she adores (as well as some she knows to avoid). So when you need a good dentist or florist or dry cleaner, what’s the first thing you do? You ask friends for their recommendations.
That’s the premise of GemShare, a mobile app that launched today. With it, you can ask all your friends for advice at once, as well as their friends, and have the answers sent directly to your phone.
(Eldeeem/Flickr)
GemShare is part Yelp, part Angie’s List, and part Nextdoor, with a dollop of mobile advice app Jelly on the side. The difference, says co-founder Maryam Mohit, is that people trust recommendations from people they know much more than the ones they get from anonymous strangers on Yelp or Angie’s List. And, unlike Nextdoor, a social network based on where you live, you get to pick your friends. Your neighbors, not so much.
It’s a good concept, but like any gem, it has a few flaws.
How GemShare works
When you log in, the app prompts you to import your phone’s address book and connect with any GemShare fans on Facebook or Gmail. Then it asks you to submit five “Gems,” recommendations for businesses you love. Enter the name of a business, and the app will Google it and fill in the appropriate address, website, and so on. Type a brief review, and you’re done. (You don’t have to submit anything if you don’t want to.)
You can also ask your network for Gems (recommendations) by typing a term like “bakery” or “sushi” into the app, followed by any particular qualities you’re looking for (inexpensive, near public transit, or whatever). You can filter friends by location or enter email addresses to ask people who don’t yet use GemShare.
The app will provide a list of recommendations from your friends and their friends, if any. You can tap on the recommendation to view it on a map, call up the website, or give the company a jingle.
You can also create groups — for, say, parents of kids who attend the same school as your little nubbins, or people in your neighborhood — and ask for Gems only from them.
And that’s the essence of the app. Pretty simple, really.
Diamond in the rough
GemShare has been in private alpha in the San Francisco area for several months, with more than 1,000 users. Not surprisingly, it is a very mom-centric app. The seven-person company was started by two working mothers, and I’d guesstimate that 90 percent of its early users are women. Mohit says the service is by no means aimed entirely at women but admits that the majority of its alpha users are female.
Today, GemShare went national. But it’s mostly just about businesses in the Bay Area.
Like every nascent social network, GemShare faces the classic chicken-and-egg problem: The app is useful only if a lot of people are using it. Install GemShare, and you may be the only person using it within a thousand miles. (Unless you live in San Francisco, in which case you’ll have plenty of company.) GemShare’s founders say they have “seed” networks set up in major U.S. cities but won’t say much beyond that.
I played with a pre-release version of the app (iOS only now, though Android is coming). It was a bit buggy and lacked a few features that are coming soon — like the ability to save other people’s Gems or to create private groups.
At the moment, searching GemShare is rather broad. Looking for “Italian restaurant” brings up any recommendation containing the words “Italian” or “restaurant.” That’s deliberate, Mohit says. As the app gains more users, she says, searches will get more specific.
Once you receive a recommendation, you can see only one GemShare review at a time — which, by definition, is always positive. There’s no way to rate the reliability (or taste) of other GemSharers, which becomes problematic at the “friends of friends” level, where you really don’t know the person doing the recommending. If you get bad advice — or if someone decides to use the app for spammy promotions — your only option is to remove that person from your network. Mohit says GemShare is looking at ways to implement some form of reputation rating down the road.
Use or lose
The other big question, of course, is where’s the money? How GemShare will ultimately convert those Gems into actual currency, so it can stay in the business of giving you recommendations, remains to be seen. Mohit declined to say how GemShare plans to make money, but advertising and lead referral fees are obvious paths. That could lead to privacy concerns down the road, depending on how these kinds of features are implemented.
Overall, GemShare is a promising upstart, both useful and easy to use. But it will succeed only if it achieves critical mass outside the Bay Area. This is one of those situations where “use it or lose it” really does apply.
Questions, complaints, kudos? Email Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.
