Tuesday, April 18, 2006
New York Times: Read It? Watched It? Swap It.
Posted by Damion Chaplin in "CONTENT" @ 06:30 AM
"For Heather Perlmutter, a 41-year-old investment portfolio manager in Manhattan, the Web site with the whimsical name made perfect sense. Like many Americans, she found herself awash in CD's, DVD's and VHS tapes that were seldom if ever played anymore. They just took up valuable space in the Upper West Side apartment where she lives with her husband and two young children. Then a friend of a friend told her about Zunafish, a new Web site that matches people with discs and tapes to trade — and video games and paperback books, too. To the delight of her 7-year-old son, Ms. Perlmutter recently used the site to barter her tape of "Fried Green Tomatoes,"...for a tape of Steven Spielberg's digital dinosaur blockbuster, "Jurassic Park.""
These types of online media trading services are becoming more and more numerous. I would probably never use a service like this because I just sell my old stuff on eBay, but almost everyone I know, including my tech-savvy friends, are afraid of eBay for one reason or another. Zunafish and others like it seem like a good idea for those people. They don't have to take a picture of it and they don't have to worry about transferring around electronic funds (a la Paypal). The article goes on to say "...if consumers were asked to place all of their CD's and DVD's, for example, in three piles — those they love, those they like well enough to keep and those they would be happy to have taken away — the piles would most likely be equal." I recently performed a purge, so my 'take away' pile is limited to the 2 discs no one would buy, but otherwise my 'love' and 'like to keep' piles are pretty equal. Are yours? I'm curious.
These types of online media trading services are becoming more and more numerous. I would probably never use a service like this because I just sell my old stuff on eBay, but almost everyone I know, including my tech-savvy friends, are afraid of eBay for one reason or another. Zunafish and others like it seem like a good idea for those people. They don't have to take a picture of it and they don't have to worry about transferring around electronic funds (a la Paypal). The article goes on to say "...if consumers were asked to place all of their CD's and DVD's, for example, in three piles — those they love, those they like well enough to keep and those they would be happy to have taken away — the piles would most likely be equal." I recently performed a purge, so my 'take away' pile is limited to the 2 discs no one would buy, but otherwise my 'love' and 'like to keep' piles are pretty equal. Are yours? I'm curious.
