A simple idea from a simple man »

I was out driving my youngest around today (so he would FINALLY nap) and since I had nothing better to do, I began to let my mind wander over ideas and things I would like to see built. What I came up with today is not that Earth shattering, and it seems like it MUST already exist (if it does please point me to it). Here's the basic idea:

A cross between a library, amazon, ebay, and facebook/twitter.

Basically...

1. You enter in all the stuff you own that you are willing to share with your friends (ie. books, movies, cds, software, etc.)

2. You list out who your friends are (and hopefully they do the same two steps).

3. You and your friends can browse each other's stuff and make requests to borrow things from each other. The system would keep track of who's got what (so you know where you stuff is and you can follow it around if it moves from friend to friend).

That's it really.

Basically it works like a library in that you borrow things. It's like Amazon because of all the stuff they have (and it would likely pull lots of data out of the Amazon API). It's like ebay because you'll be able to find just about anything. It's like facebook because of the social connection. And it's like twitter in that you can follow your stuff around as it changes hands (as long as everyone plays nice and reports the exchange).

You would probably also want to throw in some type of rating, reviews, tagging and chat/comment features so that you and your group of friends could all have conversations about all the stuff you have as a group (and what things you like and don't like).

Like I said, it's nothing all that special but at the same time it's sort of a 'DUH' kind of service...I know that when I was younger especially, one of the first things you did when you went to a friends house was to start looking through their stuff (like CDs) and almost always it lead to a "can I borrow this?"...shouldn't the internet make that a little easier too?

I've also thought of a few tag lines for it already:

"Why buy when you can borrow?"

or

"Don't Buy, Borrow."

OK - so the most important question of them all...how would it/does it make money?

My thinking is that it would be ad and affiliate based with some solid marketing/demographic information that could probably be packaged down the road.

The affiliate stuff would especially come into play when you start doing recommendations for 'groups' of people based on other groups data (ie. my group of friends all share 'The Last Dragon' a lot, group X does as well and they also all love 'I'm gonna git you sucka' which none of your friends seem to own, do you want to buy it from Amazon or ebay right now?)

You could also tie into ebay to sell stuff (ie. nobody in my group ever wants to borrow my Snow CD and I hate it now too* - let me list it on ebay).

Anyway - that's the idea that was floating around in the empty space between my ears during today's nap drive. It seems like it probably already exists, but if it doesn't I think we (the collective we) should start building it. What do you think?



* Yes, I really do own the Snow CD, and no I actually don't hate it -- I even had it playing on my iPod just the other day