Friday, July 28, 2006

Swapthing Widget: Want to Trade Books?

Given all of the recent buzz about Chris Anderson's new book titled "The Long Tail," I decided that I probably should get around to reading it. Yet, it frustrates me that I have so many business related books, which I've already read, that despite being in excellent condition are merely sitting on my shelf gathering dust. I think its important to stay up on the latest business ideas/trends but, I generally find most business books to be at least 90% crap so their value as reference material is very low. However, I recently discovered Swapthing, which facilitates bartering of goods and/or services and I love the idea of reusing my books by trading them for someone else's. Reusing is environmentally friendly and swapping is one transaction rather than buying and selling on eBay.

I'm curious to see how smooth the negotiation process of swapping goods without established values will be but otherwise Swapthing seems pretty cool and they definitely seem to be building momentum. In fact, they've even gone web 2.0 by creating community through "SwapCircles," widgets and a company blog. So if you have a bunch of business books gathering dust on your shelf and you'd like to swap with me feel free to join the SwapCircle that I created, Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs and/or checkout the new widget at the bottom of my sidebar. I'll add some more books that I have and that I want over the next couple of days but in the meantime if anyone has a copy of The Long Tail that they would like to swap for Naked Conversations or The Search, sign up for Swapthing and make me an offer!

1 Comments:

At July 30, 2006 9:45 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Andrew,

Interesting concept. I recently saw a related business concept that push this swapping idea even one step further. The concept was posted in the website www.insidethedragonsden.com about this business by Sean Young where people can actually borrow things from each other. See www.borrowme.com . Sean and his team has been working hard on their business for quite a bit now.

I will tell Sean I saw SwapThing here.

Cheers,
Kempton

 

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