Heard about the latest P2P network? It’s called the US Postal Service. A new breed of startups aims to cross Gnutella with Netflix, skirting copyright issues (bartering is legal in all 50 states). Users create Want and Have lists: ship somebody one of their Want items, and you can troll through Have lists (and pay a fee on each transaction). It’s slower than BitTorrent, but you get the actual album — not just the album art. — Jeff Howe
4 services for trading your stuff for other stuff.
NAME PEERFLIX
MEDIA DVD
Movies are given a value based on demand and age. Subscribers can swap used DVDs for other ones or exploit Peerflix as a way to get cash for their discs.
INVENTORY 40,000 titles
PER-TRADE FEE $1.50
NAME LA LA
MEDIA CD
La la emphasizes community (Hear that, VCs? Community!) with user-programmed Internet radio stations.
INVENTORY 1.8 million titles
PER-TRADE FEE $1.75
NAME PAPERBACKSWAP
MEDIA Take a guess ...
With its dowdy Web site — "We're just a group of real folks who wanted a way of trading paperbacks with each other"-it’s the schoolmarm of mail traders.
INVENTORY 254,000 titles1
PER-TRADE FEE $1.59
NAME GAMESWAP
MEDIA Videogame
Given the cost of games, you'd think GameSwap would be the most popular barter site of the bunch. Not yet. At press time, it had only 498 users.
INVENTORY 1,102 games
PER-TRADE FEE $1.99
1 Correction, Fri March 16 12:00:00 EST 2007
PaperBackSwap has 254,000 titles, not 30,000 titles, in its inventory as originally reported. (Return to the corrected text)
credit: Ronald Kurniawan
START
Make Backdating a Thing of the Past
Downloading by Mail
