A proposed website address would be www.daisychain.com

I think this is an excellent idea. It's a really neat spin on the find+swap idea that will make life easier for anyone wanting to do this. Unfortunately the daisychain.com domain belongs to someone.

However, I suggest you rename this idea to "Daisychain trades of books/CDs/DVDs" in order to capture what it's about more effectively.

I think you may run into some interesting problems on the technical side, but those will be most simply solved by saying "no chains longer than X" where X is probably 4 or 5. This also reduces the risk of having the whole chain fall apart when someone doesn't come through.

CC only is going to be a right royal pain for most students (who are going surely to be your primary market)

Sounds neat, but the thing you would run into, is that there would have to be a ebay-esque protection and rating system involved.

Say I bought a new hardback book, and Wanted to trade for another hardback book, I dont want to getone thats all old and falling apart at the seams in return for my almost mint condition book.

Additionally, you have to protect against pirated material, and the straight out selling of material (which is where Paypal and Ebay are running into now with taxes, least for those of us in the states.)

It sounds like a great idea in principle, but this would have to have additional features for it to become feasible to be used.

Great Idea. Actually it's nearly the same as mine (posted a week earlier).

grrr, I forgot the link: http://www.cambrianh...er/ideas-id/KdwPiXd/

First off, I would like to thank everyone for their support and comments. I appreciate it!

I'm thinking that when you submit an item, there will be a series of tab boxes (scroll-down boxes?) that you fill in. As you move down the list, boxes with pertainant information come up, others go away. For example, you wouldn't need to know if a DVD is hard back or paper back or if a book is widescreen or fullscreen. Among those boxes will be the condition of the item, so on and so forth. There will have to be some sort of manner to standarized this, for example, when you submit, it pulls up the closests matches to what you entered. For example, if you type in "Harry Potter" for the book title, when you submit the data, it pulls up all the Harry Potter book titles for you to select one.

Perhaps there can be some other way around the credit card to penalize abusive users, but those are details we will iron out down the road. With out a doubt, you need some sort of protection system to avoid abuse, as phantomrouge pointed out.

I strongly feel that this idea has lots of potential because of its potential ease of use and its novelty. One the surface of the programs interface, it would be amazingly simple. Underneath the surface, we take care of all the complexities and "magic". This is analogous to the way Google works.

I like this idea as well. As Aidan meantions, the a cutoff at a certain number of links in the chain might be necessary, but I think this could really promote some interesting and otherwise difficult to accomplish transactions.

I think that there are a number of swapping sites that do essentially what you suggest including allowing chains of multiple people to be involved in a swap, making this a crowded market. In fact I have read some time ago an interview where one of these sites was discussing adding the muliperson swap that you are also suggesting. Check out swaptree, lendmonkey, barterbee, zunafish, lala, and maybe more.

Good idea, but it's already out there:

www.peerflix.com
www.barterbee.com

Neither of these handle books yet, but I think DVDs and games are going to be much hotter items anyway.

*sigh*

nice idea. I thought of this, but I can't say it with words.

love this!