Friends with Things

My plan is to create the next social network and then give it away to the people that run it and use it.

This started when I saw Rachel Botsman (at TedX in Sydney) and she had a statistic:  the average electric drill was used for only 13 minutes over its entire life time. 

People didn’t want the drill, they wanted the hole.

I wondered how many other things people own that they seldom used.

I wondered about the environmental cost of manufacturing, transporting and selling all of these things; it must be huge. How much could we help the environment just by sharing what we have?

So I started Friends with Things- www.friendswiththings.com - it’s a place where you can share things with, or borrow things from your neighbours for free – from bicycles to power tools, from cameras to sewing machines.

It’s about collaborative consumption and sustainability – but there’s more to it than just helping the environment. At Friends with Things you’re also welcome to share your time, skills and expertise with people – you can even share your local knowledge or connect with local people who share common interests.

In doing this, you make connections with your neighbours  and those connections can help bring back a sense of community and neighbourhood that’s often missing from apartment complexes, city living and suburban sprawl – it’s a nice way to make friends with your neighbours.

It’s part neighbourhood notice board, part local market and part ‘town square’ - it’s a community based, it’s free and it always will be.

Friends with Things is a new kind of social network, it’s driven by a simple idea – using the digital environment to drive real world connections and exchanges between people.

In the few months since we started we’ve already been featured in two radio interviews (commercial and the ABC), been written about in 7 different blogs and magazines – and become a finalist in the 2011 Earth Hour awards.

We’re growing fast and need help, so please get in touch.

Thanks

Ravi