We're zipping along faster than the Road Runner here at SwapItGreen. We've just released a new version of the swap site with something for everyone.

• Meet us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. That's right, we're statusing, tweeting, and hamming it up on the social networks.  Become a fan, a follower, and a subscriber and we'll meet you there...FTW!
• How does it work? We’re featuring tutorials and other videos on YouTube. Check us out on YouTube or just view the videos via SwapItGreen's How It Works page.
• Make your best deal. In our first version, buyers could offer to buy a listed item only at the seller's asking price in trading points. We decided to mix it up a little. This new release introduces negotiable bids. As a buyer, you can offer whatever amount you want...in trading points. We think it's more fun to strategize your offer, considering the number of people who have viewed the listing and who may be your competition, as well as how badly you want the item. Watch as SwapItGreen becomes a marketplace where the forces of supply and demand battle it out and our site currency, the trading point, becomes a fluid but viable unit of trade.
• You have a new payment option. Google checkout is here! We want to see Google and PayPal duke it out.
• Faster than a New York minute. We’ve made changes to the site that will allow us to add servers on the fly to enhance performance as our SwapItGreen community grows.

We hope you like the changes. Let us know on Facebook!

There's a buzz in the halls here this week: SwapItGreen has emerged from beta testing! We're a full-fledged website now and we've even graduated to the domain level. Our permanent home is www.SwapItGreen.com.

Many websites these days start as beta releases that are accessible to a group of users, if not the public at large, under a subdomain. They usually do not include the full range of features planned for the public launch. Marketers use the term early adopters, referring to people who enjoy trying new products before public release. We found a group of early adopters—our beta users—and invited them to test drive the site and let us know what they liked and what they weren't so crazy about. We learned a lot from our beta users, as real-life users tend to bring a perspective that is much different from the people who develop and live with the system from its conception.

So what did we learn? First, people who use the system are generally not retailers or businesses who have a warehouse with a stock of variously sized standard shipping boxes and a postal scale. Our users are not professional shippers who can estimate with accuracy the costs of shipping and packaging. As a typical swapper, you might take something from the back of your closet or off the bookshelf. You sit at your computer and begin listing your items on SwapItGreen, humming along through the description and category and condition, suddenly coming up short on the shipping and handling fees. How can you know how much to charge until you are at the post office, where the clerk weighs your item in its final packaging and then tells you how much it will cost to ship this item in this box to this destination zip code? These are all critical elements of the shipping cost equation.

We wrestled with this problem. We considered adding hooks to the U.S. Postal Service and the major carriers, enabling sellers to provide the height, width, depth, and weight of their packages and get back an estimate of the shipping cost. But this was a further problem for two reasons: 

1.     Most of us will not immediately know the dimensions and weight of the item in its shipping container.

2.     What the shipping carriers return is merely an estimate, and we have found in our own testing that the estimate is often simply wrong.

In the end, what we really wanted was a simple, easy-to-use system, and we didn't want sellers to feel misled when they shipped their items and found that they had not charged enough for shipping.

So we tweaked our model: seller pays shipping. You invest a little when you sell an item, you recoup when you buy an item. Since everyone who joins this community intends not just to sell but also to buy (else what's the point of accumulating trading points?), we figure it all comes out in the wash.

We also changed the name for the unit of currency used on the site. Some users were confused by the term SwapItGreen dollars. We thought about it and agreed. So now you’ll see that items are sold for trading points; purchases are paid for with earned trading points.

We appreciate your valuable feedback throughout the beta phase. We're very excited to bring you this mature version of SwapItGreen, and we've got some great things planned for our all-out public launch, coming soon! 

Friday nights at our house are music nights.  We settle in, dim the lights, and watch one of the DVDs in Bob's extensive collection.  For the past month or so, our Friday evenings have been spent in the Sixties.  We started off with D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop, about the festival that kicked off the Summer of Love in 1967.  We've watched this before, of course, but this time it felt strange and sad as we watched Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Jefferson Airplane.  They all seemed so young and sweetly innocent; so many of them would be gone in just a few years.

We moved on to Woodstock next:  first, The Director's Cut, the 1994 release of Michael Wadleigh's film, then this year's 40th anniversary edition that includes The Director's Cut as well as two discs of extras.  We're still entrenched in that rain- and music-drenched three days that have so resoundingly impacted the music and culture. The footage showing the crowds as seen from the stage is breathtaking, astounding, scary—a sea of young faces that seems to flow beyond the horizon. The musicians themselves frequently remark on the unprecedented size of the crowd, noting even as the days were passing the historic nature of the event, the somewhat frightening position they were in as they stood before this untrammeled mass of humanity. 

The times were a-changing, to be sure—the context for this event was much different from the Monterey Pop Festival.  Vietnam, and those news clips putting war for the first time in Americans' living rooms every night, were beginning to absorb the country and especially the young people who would likely be shipped off to that distant, war-torn land that few had even heard of 10 years before. Many of the songs performed throughout the Festival were—explicitly or implicitly—anti-war protest songs: Country Joe McDonald's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag", Richie Havens' "Handsome Johnny," Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers."  Six-months-pregnant Joan Baez spoke about the recent arrest of her husband David Harris, who was still in jail at the time for refusing military induction. Most moving of all the performances is Jimi Hendrix' iconic and immortal “Star Spangled Banner”, which Jimi turns into a heart-wrenching plea to remember who we are, where we came from, and what we are capable of in our best moments.

Soon Bob and I will be moving on, no doubt, to Gimme Shelter, the Maysles' brothers' rockumentary about the Rolling Stones 1969 tour and Altamont Festival, which took place just a few months after Woodstock but seemingly in another world.  Originally billed as Woodstock West, Altamont degenerated into violence amid repeated, futile pleas from Mick Jagger, "Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting?"  Indeed.  The fabled Sixties was unraveling. 

Up for grabs in the SwapItGreen inventory as I write this are two Woodstock entries, the two-disc special 40th anniversary edition of Woodstock: Three Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut and the two-CD release of Music From the Original Soundtrack and More: Woodstock.  Both are priceless slices of American life, the American struggle, symbolizing the bonds that music forges in a society undergoing painful transition.