Future Now
The IFTF Blog
SwapThing
Yesterday, Jessica Hardwick came to IFTF to give a talk about her company, SwapThing, which "enables the trade and barter of any combination of items and services between consumers and small businesses, using cash to offset unequal exchanges." Their charge is $1 per swap (which can include bundle of multiple items) from each swapper, or $10 for people who are offering services. They have an algorithm which tries to find appropriate matches for your items based on your interests, groups, tags from your items, and other elements of your profile. Jessica argued that the understanding of online reputation, trust and community spilling over from sites like ebay, amazon and myspace gives SwapThing an advantage over the numerous barter sites of the late 90s boom. She also attributed some of their growth to an attitude switch from unrestricted consumption to essentially smart networking, using connectivity tools to conserve garage space and minimize production waste at the same time.
I was relieved to hear how open they were willing to go to make their site work. They have a subsection, ShareThing, to enable donation of things or time to non-profits; they have an open API for anyone who wants to build their own interface; and they are willing to share anonyimzed data with researchers if they get to see the results.