Thursday, July 12, 2007

Trading services that serve me well

There's so much Web 2.0 going on recently that I really see something big coming our way. The biggest "me, me!" of the last two or so years is getting some internet service going, think of some funky name, leave out the last vowel, throw in tagging, rating and user accounts with some fancy API (well, here's what I really love about Web 2.0: JSON and XML and all the REST-based stuff are really easy to understand, easy to implement and standards-based - see my python-youtube client for a trivial example). There are lots of examples out in the wild.

Of course, some services are really neat - I've talked about Doodle before, and Last.fm is nice for finding related music and having an automatically generated "toplist" of songs, possibly spread over many machines, iPods and music player, because all can interface with Last.fm.

There are other services in my favourites list that are not really Web2.0-ish, but have been around for a long time. The fact that these services are still around gives you a clue about their usefulness:

GameTZ, the Game Trading Zone is a service where one can list games (+hardware), movies, books and music to form a "available" list and list things they want to have (the "wanted" list). The website makes it easy to find matches which can then result in an offer being sent. Offer history is kept on the website (some kind of dialog between the two traders) and after an agreement has been made, the offer can be transformed into a trade, which will then be pending until both sides of the trade mark it as "received". A trade is usually followed by rating the other side of the trade. Really cool, and I've already made good trades on this site. My profile can be found here if you want to have a look.

The next service I really like (although I haven't used it recently) is db.etree.org, the Trader's Database. It's basically something like GameTZ (only the listing part, not the offer/trade/rate part), but for lossless live concert recordings. Many artists allow their fans to swap live recordings of their concerts in lossless formats over the Internet, and the Trader's Database makes this very easy. With special features like AJAX-based search and metadata that are useful for trading live music, it's really nice and easy to find shows on the 'net.

All these services come without any API and have all their vowels in place (or at least there are no vowels to leave out). Still, they rock. I hope when all the Web2.0 hype is over, that these services will survive.

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