Black Friday….BLACK FRIDAY IS ALMOST HERE!!! I’ve written extensively about how much I love this day / week / experience, but…I’ve been longing for more. What if…what if I could utilize my software development expertise to create a tool that acted as a deal aggregator? You know…like the Priceline/Expedia/Kayak, but for…online shopping? Well, I’m not quite there yet, but this is the first step…
gemmit!
gemmit.com (not live yet, still working out the kinks) and @gemmitdeals are a phase 1 approach to that end. What is “gemmit”? gemmit is a play on words obviously referring to “gems”. What do you do with gems? Well…you try to “get it”! Gems. Get it. gemmit (are you familiar with “Reddit”; same concept)! Here is an example deal that gemmit found:
NEW #Toys Deal! $5.99 for Nerf Rebelle Pink Crush Blaster.. ( http://t.co/rxK1khsuha) #BlackFriday #Deals
— gemmit (@gemmitDeals) November 3, 2013
Note that this particular item was a SlickDeals frontpage; so gemmit *is working today*!
gemmit uses a proprietary algorithm that calculates what makes a deal a “deal”! The Twitter feed gemmitDeals is posting the BEST deal in every category (two dozen or so) that it is tracking. These categories include things like: Electronics, Movies, Toys, Jewelry, Video Games, Books, etc.
Here is a mockup of what Gemmit looks like so far:
Obviously, the technology is very, very early. There are most likely some bugs to be found and without question, numerous features to implement. But…gemmit *will be* launching within a week or two, simply because of the holiday season. I plan on using this tool myself because, well…I essentially wrote it for me, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have higher hopes for it. I’m hoping it can grow and become something special, but that’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of luck! I can at least control one aspect of that equation…
One last thing…so, like I mentioned, gemmit is not ready to launch *just quite yet*. BUT…it is basically fully functioning, I just have some more work to do with the User Interface; some features are just disabled or broken (e.g. social media support, email newsletter not implemented; home page isn’t built yet). But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t use some feedback from Alpha testers! You can checkout an incomplete version of the website here (this link will be dead once the real website launches).
What does work? Well, I’ve broken down some example categories in the top navbar (such as Books, Movies), the content populated within those should be complete. Search works. Filtering works. Other than that, not much else. =E
Given that this is in test mode, expect that the server will be unavailable from time to time (e.g. I may disable it as needed). That said, I could appreciate some user testing! What do you like? What don’t you like? What would you like to see in the future?
I value your support and welcome any feedback, I’ve been working on this for many months in my, oh so precious (and scarce), free time. Let me know what you think in the comments section and stay tuned for more gemmit updates!
(Psst. Don’t worry…if you don’t care about my pet project, I plan on making a separate blog on gemmit itself to talk about new features there and leave this blog open for…well, whatever it is I talk about)
Update: 11/23/13 – www.gemmit.com is live! The Alpha site above has been decommissioned, and if you wish to learn more about gemmit, please visit blog.gemmit.com!
