LendAround - I got an email from LendAround, who saw my earlier comments on borrowing websites and gave me an invite to the beta site. Like many of the other applications out there, they are only used for a dedicated good (in this case, DVDs), but the site is quite well done (autocomplete in data entry, good design, facebook integration), and according to them, will expand beyond DVDs eventually. Once they’ve expanded to allowing goods of any sort I’ll give them a real try-out.
Goal: find an online tool which allows me to list things that others (friends and neighbours) can borrow, and let me view things that others have listed
This doesn’t seem like an impossible goal. One problem is that most of the websites for this seem to be for only books, movies, etc., few work for just any miscellaneous items. The only thing that matches is Neighborrow. The site isn’t particularly well-designed, but I could live with that.
How this should really work is that I should be able to state my location as the source for all my items, and be able to search geographically. Instead I have to join “neighborrowhoods,” which can either be public or private. This isn’t as good as arbitrary locations, but it would do, except that there are no public neighborrowhoods for my location and it costs $$ to create one, versus private groups (which are not what I want) and are limited to fifty people. I thought that Facebook applications might be another good place to look, but there seem to be only media-sharing applications plus one that matches my idea but is broken and has no users.
So for now, I’ve listed most of my borrowable stuff on neighborrow, which can sadly only be seen if you join the private group I created which so far includes just me. bleh