I had the opportunity to interview Internet entrepreneur Eric Goldstein founder/CEO of Clipmarks.com and Amplify.com. Eric is not your traditional technology innovator; his entrée into this industry is the result of his appreciation for conversation. While growing up in Long Island Eric’s family would often have discussions around the dinner table where he would learn and appreciate the value of different opinions and ideas. Ultimately this led Eric to pursue a career in Law.

About 10 years ago the foundations of Clipmarks.com were originating in Eric’s mind. By 2004 the site was launched and evolved to be a community that he is very fond of to this day. There was one small problem with Clipmarks from the internet entrepreneur side of things, the model was not scalable. Eric was forced to make decisions that would provide insight into his character. Despite the suggestion of at least one potential investor Eric opted to keep the Clipmarks community alive and create a new scalable site – Amplify.com.

The emphasis on conversation is still the driving force but the new site has scalability in its DNA. Amplify was officially launched in 2009 without much fanfare. Eric realized that if a site was to succeed it had to be viral, so there was no hype, no pre-launch party, no balloons, advertising or marketing push. The site was officially launched by about a half dozen employees and family members. Amplify has since proven that it can grow organically and viral with the number of posts and users growing substantially month over month. As of the interview there were approximately 800 posts per day on the Amplify.com website.

When we talked about the priorities of the site evolution, Eric mentioned that the feed portion of the site will be undergoing an overhaul. It will not come as a surprise that the overhaul is intended to further improve the quality of the conversation. After the overhaul is completed it is likely that support for pushing the content you create on amplify.com to other blog sites such as WordPress or Blogger. Presently you can choose (via checkbox) to push your content to:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Friendfeed
• Tumblr
• Posterous
• Plurk
• Diigo
• Delicious
• Clipmarks

When the blog integration is complete it will allow most users to rely solely upon Amplify.com to generate their content. This will really be quite an achievement.

I will be following Amplify.com very closely both as a user and a fan of their technology and conversational approach. For me 2010 is the year of the conversation, and that extends from Social Media, Family, Work, Blogtalkradio, and face to face meet-ups. While we were wrapping up the show Eric and I agreed that we would explore having another conversation down the road perhaps where some of the users of the site will call in and interact.

Listen to the entire Interview

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