Start a local networking service for sharing movies, music, and books

The site is being tested now (early Apr ‘06) and we’ll launch a private beta with our first version within the next few weeks. If you haven’t but your name on the list, you may want to shortly, as we’ll close signups down until August in just a few days. There is a ‘mailing list’ here if you haven’t put your email in:
http://alpha.borrowme.com/mailinglist/

—Sean
President & Captain BorrowMe

PS – regular updates and related info are found on our blog:
http://blog.borrowme.com

I use a german p2p media exchange network called Hitflip. They offer DVDs, audiobooks, movies, games and music-CDs. Works great for me.

I guess the folks behind BorrowMe ran into some serious trouble after the alpha launch. They never got beyond Step One and have decided to pull back into “prototype” mode. So, for now, so much for BorrowMe.

I just received an invite to be a “charter member” of BorrowMe, which is all about borrowing and lending stuff within a trusted circle of people. It looks somewhat promising. So far the only thing I can do with it is add stuff to my lend list. Sure would be nice if, say, I wanted to list all of my DVDs I could just enter the bar code or something, but it’s unfortunately all manual data entry. Since it’s in beta, there won’t be any adding of friends or lending for a couple of weeks.

For me to really use this and ask people I know to use it they are going to have to make the data entry easier. Also, it’s going to need RSS feeds. I don’t see any sign of that yet. I’m willing to stay tuned for a few weeks to see how it fleshes out. There are feedback links all over the site so let’s hope they’re paying attention.

My co-workers and I have setup a community on the Video Exchange Community website (VEC http://www.videoexchange.org ). We list our movies/games and such and it manages requests and who has what checked out.

The Seattle Public Library is now advertising two new personal feeds, one for what you have checked out and another for what’s on your holds list. Both feeds are updated with notifications for when items are due or have arrived at the library for pickup. Cool!

A site called SuperBorrowNet (http://www.superborrownet.com/) seems to be working toward the same idea. I haven’t signed up yet, but the site just won a web award at SXSW Interactive, so it’s probably worth checking out.

...in need of some additional users: http://communitysteps.org/library/

Maybe it’s because I have no time to read, listen to music or watch movies, but I found myself looking at this item on my list and trying to remember why I wanted to do this. Does anyone have a cheesy movie like “Before Sunrise” to lend me, because I got a copy from the library after waiting 3 weeks and it was warped from a cigarette burn through the cover. What sort of folks are using the library these days? I’m not saying I’m deleting the goal. I’m just sayin’

I’d like to start a local networking service for sharing lead on real estate. I’ve already fired up a website called http://realsocial.com in pursuit of this goal. I’d like to do some sharing of media for websites as well.