The Grog Blog

RT @bethmason_net: 8 Ways to Green Your Trash. Start right in your own home and see how green your trash can get. http://bit.ly/1a9XTP

RT @CampusEarthHour College students: Check out the toolkit to promote Earth Hour. Get your university involved! http://tinyurl.com/cw4q6k

Freebootr will be in Boulder, CO Saturday through Wednesday attending various events. DM or reply if you want to meet up!

Going clear in 2009, as in clear air, water and land that are not filled with litter or pollution. http://is.gd/g7wy

Colleges and Universities participating in RecycleMania 2009 to promote reuse and recycling: http://recyclemaniacs.org/overview.htm

Fun post by @lifehacker about repurposing projects from 2008: http://is.gd/dGq7

6 Reasons Why Freebootr is Different

In the world of reuse The Freecycle Network™ is a behemoth, currently claiming over 6.3 million users in about 4600 Yahoo! Groups. What started as a simple mailing list in Tucson, AZ has turned into a worldwide organization in just 5 1/2 years. The Freecycle Network has done an amazing job advocating for reuse, but the current implementation of the service suffers from some problems. Here are our observations about Freecycle.

The Freecycle Network chose to implement it’s interface through Yahoo! Groups in 2003. Unfortunately, Yahoo! Groups is not very robust; it does what it was intended for, but no more. It also tends to overwhelm people with emails and not just for posts, even signing up involves 5 or more emails. The current Freecycle model involves a single individual per group in charge of moderation, which can cause postings to be delayed and sometimes, not always, can lead to abuse of moderator powers. To work around the limitations of Yahoo! Groups, a posting format was created. Some moderators may reject a posting if the format is specified incorrectly and other may not enforce the format at all. This means that listings might use different terminology, or none at all, making it difficult to manage the emails coming into a user’s inbox through filters/rules.

Freebootr is attempting to solve these problems and more!

1. We’re not a Yahoo! Group…

Freebootr is a dynamic web service. We don’t need to employ workarounds because we have control of the code for the site and can quickly make adjustments based on feedback from our users. Ultimately this leads to improved functionality, ease of use and less user frustration.

2. Excessive emails? Not here!

Freebootr doesn’t send an excessive amount of emails and there are no TAKEN, WANTED or RECEIVED posts to deal with. As a member of Freebootr you see only offers on the site!

3. Searchable AND Geo-located

Our offers are highly searchable and can be viewed on a map so you can find the items closest to your location.

4. Posting is easy

Freebootr’s listing creation interface was designed to require certain data prior to acceptance of the listing. This greatly reduces the amount of improperly formatted listings and obviates the role of a moderator to check this format. This is also what allows us to map items because we require a location for each listing.

5. Self-moderation

In contrast to Freecycle, all of our users are moderators. Moving away from the single-moderator-per-group model removes a major source of frustration for current Freecycle group members. On Freebootr, every listing has an option to “flag this listing”. We review flagged listings and take appropriate steps to correct any problems. We trust the Freebootr community to identify what should or should not be present on the site, as well as errors in the listings.

6. Communication is key

We believe in open, honest communication with our users. You can always contact us through our Freebootr email, Freebootr twitter account or here on the Freebootr blog.

We’re a small organization working in our spare time to make this a thriving community, so please be patient with us if it takes a few days for us to respond. If you have a suggestion or criticism, we want to know, so please talk with us!

Take care and happy reducing, reusing and recycling!

Great article by Libuse Binder on @earth911 about how to start your own reuse revolution in 2009: http://is.gd/eGIe

Did you know http://freebootr.com has almost 30K listings, in just a few short weeks? Find things in your area and save them from the trash!

Freebootr: The official version

Yarrr, we released the official version o’ Freebootr, and it be new and improved! Here be some things ye can expect:

• Redesigned front page and logo
• Ye can now tell us yer location so we can set the map
• Dragin’ the map’ll bring in new results
• Improved search
• Return to listings from individual listing page takes ye back to the map item ye were lookin’ at
• Opt-in/out o’ bein’ contacted by us
• Revised TOU, view ‘em o’er here
• We provided ye some guidelines ‘bout postin’ and searchin’
• Improved readability for ye landlubbers

Thank ye’s are in order!

• Big thanks to Jason Newlin and Matt Gist fer their help, inspiration and design skills
• Huge thanks to Hacknight fer feedin’ us pizza and various tasty beverages while we slaved in the Freebootr galley whippin’ up the goodness ye see today
• Special thanks go out to Remi Taylor who made a custom Rails gem for us to use on Freebootr… and he made it in about 3 hours!
• Thanks to all the people who be givin’ us advice and feedback on the site, from developers and designers to angel investors and, of course, our wonderful end users

As always, we cherish yer feedback, so keep it comin’. There be lots o’ stuff already posted, so get out there and freeboot, matey!