Creativity and Garbage

Creativity is one of those over-used words that conjures up images of tacky arts and crafts and people sitting around in brainstorming sessions coming up with garbage proposals for solving problems that they have no clue about. So let me add my idea to the heap.

Today I threw out a couple of perfectly good food mixer beaters because the mixer had died and I got a new one which of course included beaters.

This made me think of an urgently needed web application. It would be similar to craigslist and ebay, minus the complexities/hassle of online payments, buyer ratings, and dealing with strangers. It would be about deepening friendships with business.

The idea is to integrate into a friend network site (Facebook seems to be the default these days) a utility that allows members to list any or all of their possessions in something like an excel spreadsheet with just two columns, with an optional third column: item, price, description.

The resulting data would be made search-able for anyone with permissions (all my friends, for example), and I could search the merchandise data of all my friends. Transactions with friends are easy, and provide excuses to get together instead of incurring shipping costs.

If this application were available to me I would immediately post my sweet dehumidifier that I haven't used for a year, a few odd tools, and stuff like old beaters that I just throw in a pile in the corner and imagine there would be a use for someday.