The Freecycle Network is brilliant - lots of stuff gets rehomed that would otherwise get dumped in landfills. People get their redundant stuff taken away, people get free stuff (computers, toasters, clothes...), it's good for the environment, it's all good. Technically speaking, it's in the dark ages though. It runs via mailing lists, which are operated by Yahoo and apply to discrete geographical areas. It works well enough, but I think it could be improved on, or at least supplemented.
I would like to see a system based around open standards. I envisage:
* A structured way of listing spare stuff - ie. hListing or some variant.
* A way of managing a network of people whose stuff you're interested in - Portable Contacts? Whatever the state of the art is, not sure. Ideally something that can be somewhat integrated with people's existing social network info. Or, screw it, just a list would do for now.
* A standard way of managing who can see your listings - OAuth?
* A web application that you can use to manage your listings (or in time any number of applications, since the end result is standards-based output)
* A web application that aggregates, filters, searches and displays other people's listings (these last two bullet points are probably functions of the same application)
This is a bit sketchy but If it's feasible, I think such a system has a number of advantages over Freecycle or the various balkanized web-based databases of free stuff. I vaguely intend to look into doing this myself at some point, but I'm hoping if I pimp the idea about a bit somebody else will do it for me (or with me).
The Freecycle Network is brilliant - lots of stuff gets rehomed that would otherwise get dumped in landfills. People get their redundant stuff taken away, people get free stuff (computers, toasters, clothes...), it's good for the environment, it's all good. Technically speaking, it's in the dark ages though. It runs via mailing lists, which are operated by Yahoo and apply to discrete geographical areas. It works well enough, but I think it could be improved on, or at least supplemented.
I would like to see a system based around open standards. I envisage:
* A structured way of listing spare stuff - ie. hListing or some variant.
* A way of managing a network of people whose stuff you're interested in - Portable Contacts? Whatever the state of the art is, not sure. Ideally something that can be somewhat integrated with people's existing social network info. Or, screw it, just a list would do for now.
* A standard way of managing who can see your listings - OAuth?
* A web application that you can use to manage your listings (or in time any number of applications, since the end result is standards-based output)
* A web application that aggregates, filters, searches and displays other people's listings (these last two bullet points are probably functions of the same application)
This is a bit sketchy but If it's feasible, I think such a system has a number of advantages over Freecycle or the various balkanized web-based databases of free stuff. I vaguely intend to look into doing this myself at some point, but I'm hoping if I pimp the idea about a bit somebody else will do it for me (or with me).