Freecycling Comes to Facebook – Earth911.com.
Freecycling Comes to Facebook
by Alexis Petru
Published on September 14th, 2011
1 Comment
Oodle is launching FreeCircles, the first freecycling communities on Facebook, initially in San Francisco Bay Area cities and then across the U.S. Photo: Flickr/frankh
Got a couch, TV or set of dishes in good condition that you need to get rid of?
Now you can find a new home for your unwanted, but usable goods while you update your Facebook status.
Online classifieds company Oodle is launching new FreeCircle communities on Facebook, allowing neighbors to offer reusable items to each other and search for items they want for free. Oodle is initially setting up these groups for cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, but will soon be expanding the program to other cities across the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.
“Oodle’s Marketplace has always promoted reusing items,” says Mark Robins, Oodle’s vice president of community. “Today we’ve made the process a lot easier. Once you join your local FreeCircle, you can search for and claim free stuff, get rid of things you’re not using or post a message requesting something that you are looking for.”
The idea of freecycling – the act of giving away usable, unwanted goods for free rather than disposing of them in landfills – isn’t new, but bringing this concept of sharing and reuse to the world’s largest social network is.
Oodle’s FreeCircles introduce freecycling to a huge audience: About 65 percent of U.S. online consumers are currently active on Facebook, and the average Facebook user spends eight hours on the site every month, according to ExactTarget. Plus, Oodle’s Marketplace already has over 13 million unique monthly users.
READ: Facebook Game Upcycles Trash for Charity
Security, convenience, bells and whistles
Oodle says its freecycling communities offer advantages over anonymous online classifieds or email groups: from security and convenience to extra bells and whistles.
Unlike anonymous online classifieds or email groups, each FreeCircle member’s account is linked to a Facebook profile, so you can see a real name, a photo and any friends you have in common. Being able to verify your fellow community member’s identity makes transactions safer for members and potentially more reliable, Oodle says. Participants in a FreeCircle community may be less likely than members of other groups to agree to pick up an item, but then fail to show up.
While email groups don’t have the capacity to both include photos with emails and save them on the group website, FreeCircle members can post up to 10 photos of an item for giveaway. When an item has been claimed, FreeCirclers can click a “mark as taken” button, letting other members know the item is off the market, instead of sending out a mass email to the group.
FreeCircle participants can also post or search for items using Oodle’s smart phone apps.
“With the Marketplace mobile app, you can photograph an item with your phone and offer it to your neighbors in under a minute,” Robins says.
To show members the environmental benefits of their freecycling, each FreeCircle features a graph displaying the number of items saved from the landfill in recent months.
No takers for a posted item? FreeCircle refers members who can’t find a new home for their unwanted goods to Earth911’s recycling directory, so they can find other environmentally-friendly ways to get rid of their old stuff.
