Freecycle

Anyone who has talked to me recently has probably hyeard me start blabbing about freecycling and freestores. I am very interested in it as a way of reducing waste and waste handling related problems (filling landfills). I was excited to see that NetSquared had an interview with the FreeCycle Founder I was super surprised to read him say that he thought his org was doing “the best work with new tools”. Since I first discovered Freecycle.org I have been dissapointed in the lack of new web technologies in use. For most of its life Freecycle has basically just been soem yahoogroups that have sometimes hundreds or even thousands of posts a day. Watching the New York and Brooklyn Freecycle lists is a full time job.

So i went back and checked out Freecycle.org to see if maybe they have made some new changes. Indeed they have but only a limited number of groups are involved and they still see behind the times.

What do I recommend for freecycle? Tagging, geolocating and rss. Implement those 3 things and you will be set. I want to be able to subscribe to an rss feed for instrument+electronics within a 5 mile radius of my zip. When I post something i want it to automatically have my geolocation (from my member profile) and i want to be able to tag is, and not have to categorize it rigidly. They are pretty close, seems like they have implemented geolocating, but right now the searching is based on words in the post titles. And while they do have saved searches, it is based on sending emails.