Review: SwitchPlanet
Remember back in school when you’d trade CDs or video games with your friends?
SwitchPlanet is social networking’s answer. SwitchPlanet is the same idea, but on a global scale. You can put up your old items and request whatever you want.
SwitchPlanet is not quite the same as simply trading with someone, it’s a little like a pawn shop actually. You can post your items, but you don’t have to worry about the person that wants your item having something that you want.
If an item you list is wanted, you’re credited with “switchbucs”. You can then use these to “buy” items from other members; it doesn’t have to be from the same person that wanted your item. It’s pretty much ebay, but with a fake currency.
Now all this social networking is quite a new technology, and switchplanet is even newer; it even happily sports a big web 2.0 “Beta!” tag. It is apparent that the site is still in beta, and I had a couple technical issues with the site. First off, the validation email never arrived, so I couldn’t verify my account. Attempts to resend the validation email eventually worked, but the system remained a bit shaky; I would still get the odd error here and there. This is to be expected for a beta site, so I won’t hold it against them.
It’s a great idea for a site, and it’s interesting to see social networking permeating all the way off the internet and into the physical world. It is a free site, and the idea that you can have one-way trades is a great. I think a bit more work has to go into creating a really stable base, and I can see this being quite popular when it gets out of beta and becomes more widespread.
Overall, I can definitely see this being useful in getting something good for some old junk.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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