Facebook Integrates Book Swap Feature into Marketplace

Facebook has developed a book swap feature for its Marketplace application called Marketplace Book Exchange that enables users to buy and sell books from and to each other. Books are identified by buyers and sellers by their ISBN numbers, and curiously it looks as though there is no way to view all of the books offered in a particular network.

On the one hand, this appears to be a smart move for Facebook, as college students are fed up with buying expensive textbooks from their college bookstores. The Social Graph certainly lends itself to buying and selling items from others within a localized market, such as a college campus.

However, Facebook is not the first to try helping college students find better deals online. There are several websites, such as Campus Books and eCampus, dedicated to this purpose. There are even two applications developed on the Facebook platform - Swap Roll Book Exchange and Campus Book Exchange - meant to help Facebook users find books and other items that others currently own and are willing to sell or trade.

While these Facebook applications have a combined total of less than a thousand users each, they may have experienced a surge of growth as students return to campus this Fall. Now that Facebook has developed its own application for book-swapping purposes, these independently developed applications don’t have a chance. Moral of the story for Facebook application developers: if the idea behind your application is any good, expect to see Facebook develop its own application to supplant yours. Don’t expect them to just sit on the sidelines and watch.

Thanks for the tip Noah.

37Signals Drives Another Company To The DeadPool

Ok, the title is a bit ridiculous. But 37Signals has been urging developers for years now to charge for their software, and attacking anyone who suggests a business can be made from giving that software away for free instead. Their model works for their own products, at least so far. But I believe they are responsible for influencing a number of startups to charge for products that were already commoditized by the time they launched. Which is suicide.

Feedlounge, a subscription-based online RSS reader, is the most recent casualty. They launched in 2005 and offered a web based feed RSS feed reader for a monthly subscription fee. There were a number of free competitors at the time, including Bloglines and NewsGator, which had dominant market share. FeedLounge planned to carve a niche for itself by offering speedier and slightly better service.

The reader was good but not great, and came out in the middle of the pack when we reviewed the competition in mid 2006. But the company defended its business model until the end - hear our podcast interview at TalkCrunch with founder Alex King where he defended his business model.

They shut down over two months ago, canceled everyone’s subscriptions, and no one seemed to notice until now. FeedLounge is now in the deadpool, although they may re-emerge as a free service at some point.

If you are in a position to charge for your software and you aren’t that concerned with dominating your category, by all means go for it. But to blindly follow the idea that software must not be free because, damnit, people put a lot of time and effort into it, means you probably shouldn’t be making the business decisions for your company. And if you are entering what is already a commoditized business (online feed readers in this case) that has a price point of zero, you are absolutely crazy to try to charge for that product.

Offering your product for free isn’t always the right choice, either. Often, the right choice is to never have entered the market to begin with. But just because 37Signals tell you you are dumb to go the free route doesn’t mean you have to be a lemming and walk over the cliff.

US Endeavour shuttle to stay docked to ISS until Aug. 20

MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti) - NASA has prolonged the Endeavour shuttle's visit to the International Space Station, where it has been docked since Friday, until August 20, the agency's Web site said.
Inspection shows tile gouge almost reaches shuttle skin Spaceflight Now
NASA: Shuttle tiles pierced Chicago Tribune
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MOTOROLA - W220 (Black)

MOTOROLA - W220 (Black) This 93 grams clamshell phone has a lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 460 minutes and standby time of 290 hours. It has a 65k colour TFT display with resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. It also has features like polyphonic ringtones, dual band, mp3 capability, fm radio, MMS, EMS, SMS, GPRS, WAP, calculator, calendar, currency converter, alarm, clock and ringtone composer. Price Rs. :- 3,705 User Rating : 5.57 Good