Lets start with a review of some of the business problems Kashless.org is trying to solve for our members who post and search for free items.

Search and browse.  There are multiple sites with free listings.  Many sites lump all free into one category.  Or they make you read every e-mail searching for what you want.  Or subscribe to multiple lists.  No easy way to browse free listings by category, neighborhood, city, distance from where you are, or have the system search for you. 

Everything is done only in email.  While I love my email client, it is a pretty blunt instrument with which to perform ecommerce. Giving and getting free stuff is ecommerce.  That is why eBay, Amazon etal have lots of ways to do business with a browser based application. 

User transparency is lacking. Many marketplaces today are anonymous or you only have an e-mail from someone.  No context as to that person’s reputation, feedback in prior transactions, history, etc.  When I am giving something away or going over to someone’s house to pick something up, I want to know something about who I am dealing with and have the software application help me establish trust. 

Those aren’t the only problems we are solving, but some of the big ones.  So lets check out some of the new KL Alpha features with this context.

Way better UI.  The whole look and feel of the site has been re-designed by Krew member Jordan.  Better colors, fonts, more intuitive navigation, standardized buttons, more tab, all the bells and whistles of a professionally designed consumer ecommerce web site. 

New Browse tab.  When you mouse over or click on the “Browse” tab, you now get a list of product categories and neighborhoods/towns to browse.   With a count of how many items in each.  So for example if you live on Queen Anne in Seattle and want to see how many free items are in your neighborhood, you now can. 

Manage Conversation through the site.  We have implemented a very sophisticated message handling system that now allows you to send and receive e-mails as you always do about free items, but a copy of each message is saved on the Kashless site.  So now you can see all the messages relating to one of your listings in one place. You can respond to many people at once.  Coming soon, you can have the system tell new offers when an item is taken.  These are very powerful features when dealing with the large volume of responses you typically receive on free offers.  The Krew was also worked very hard so that you can use e-mail OR the Kashless site to interact on listings.  This is probably our coolest feature. 

Requirement to be logged into Kashless.org. During the initial part of the Kashless Alpha, we let anyone who came to the site see all listings, make offers, and use most of the features without an account.  But then we started thinking about transparency.  Every Kashless.org member has a public profile page.  Many of our third party sites that provide listings also only allow individual use of those listings. So we made the change to require users to be valid Kashless members in more cases.  While this is a pain in many ways, it leads to more trustworthy transactions and a more efficient market. 

In my personal experience zero of my posts have been removed for actual CL terms violation and 100% of them have been flagged by haters.  There are competitors on CL that can flag your posts with impunity and no repercussions.  I have a friend in the rental business and this is a constant war between her and competitors flagging her listings. Her listings have about a 2 hour life on CL.  Today I posted a “Gig” for some BRoll video footage.  Completely a valid job paying $2K.  I received a stock email from a video production company which was basically spam and did not address any of the specific needs of my project.  I replied that I thought it was unprofessional to respond with a form letter and please address my RFP directly.  Five minutes later my post was flagged and removed.   A hater.  “Well if I can’t get the job, no-one will".  No visibility for me, nothing. 

This system is bad for both sides.  The crazy minority can ruin the market for the majority.  Craig’s list could really use a reputation system. 

Windows 7 is no faster than 64 bit Vista that I had on my Dell XPS M1530

It broke Chrome (twice)

It broke all my printers (had to re-install)

Outlook, IE, and Explorer regularly crash now.

Outlook no longer recognizes the security certificate of my Exchange server. 

The gadgets are placed on the wrong monitor in a dual monitor set up by default and no way to change.

Overall Windows 7 is a FAIL but I can’t go back.

excerpt:

Was there really price manipulation? Absolutely. While SNS may have been the first to call the game "rigged," both for Enron and for this most recent oil price run-up, all the experts are now on board, having seen how quickly prices declined on the downside.

As Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize, put it in a special Wall Street Journal supplement last week: "As oil approached the previously untouched $100 barrier in 2007 [Pub. Note: Crossing that barrier was first predicted here in SNS], other factors began to play a larger role. The impact of financial markets became more and more evident, with investors becoming increasingly active. --- The impact of speculation and hedging on the price was self-reinforcing, leading to more speculation and hedging."

What Daniel either  doesn't know or doesn't write about is the worst part of this story: the Trigger Theory - the increasing likelihood that physical sellers of oil were a part of this price speculation effort.

As proof that the media, and therefore the world, continues to live in ignorance of how the oil industry really works, I would offer a front-page business story that noted "increased inventory levels" of oil, even as the price "unexplainedly" went up 11% in a day.

When, exactly, will Congress (excepting Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, who really does) get it, will the media get it, will the public get it? After they've been skinned five more times? Never?

Two weeks ago, sensing soft pricing, oil transhippers froze tanker traffic. They decided not to deliver on time, which converted the world's tankers instantly into a huge new warehouse; it also allowed inventories on land to pile up. The result was immediate: cut off supply, prices rise - in this case, 11% in one day. That is called price manipulation, and the oil business is better at this than at finding new oil in the ground. And no, you won't find this story anywhere else but here.

By running the price up from around $14 to over 10 times that amount, price manipulators seeking bloated profits achieved several unintended consequences, in addition to making money on options:

A National Public Radio report on Wednesday suggested that most projects in solar and biofuels had been negatively impacted by current low prices. Members will remember our Special Letter by then-biofuels leader Martin Tobias, suggesting that major oil providers were driving up feedstock prices to eliminate biofuel companies as competition (SNS: Special Letter: Big Oil - 1; Renewable Fuels - 0, July 21, 2008).

One private equity expert from the Northwest, quoted in the NPR program, said that about one-third of his VC contacts are "frozen - paralyzed with fear." That would mean, not investing in alternative energy sources, among other things.

And the Saudis are suddenly talking about pumping more oil, even as they meet to discuss oil reductions. The Saudis seem smarter about oil pricing than the Texans. (Of course, the Texans brought us Enron, the JFK assassination, and under-the-table federal political control for 30-50 years.)

With OPEC meeting again in a month, the Saudis turning moderate, the Texans getting ready to "juice the machine" again, and Silicon Valley trying to move ahead on its investments, the battle is joined.

Is it possible that Big Oil will, accidentally, help Silicon Valley? I think so.

Will the Saudis, using OPEC, try to prevent it? I think so.

In which case, the problem isn't really Oil vs. Technology at all, but the Saudis vs. the Texans, with the VCs and their companies - and the planet's welfare - in the middle of the fight.

Won't ExxonMobil, when it realizes what it's doing, come back and whack the alternative energy companies, just as Martin's company got whacked, totally in line with its habit of paying $5-10MM/year for fake science denying global warming?

Yes, it will. It wants its crazy profits, and it wants no threats at the same time. People who read this, and really understand it, will keep watch for its every move, as it works to jack up prices while creating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about global warming, alternative energies, and anything related to them.

While I agree with Craig and the EFF that web services are tools and good services can be used by bad people, there is room for judgment here.  CL has the liaise faire slider WAY over to the left into total anarchy.  That is the kind of marketplace it is.  People know what the are getting.  Buyer be ware.  People looking for a different experience should go to a different marketplace.  The fact that weird stuff happens in the “erotic services” category should surprise no-one.  

There are different marketplaces out there whose creators have set the liaise faire  slider in a different place.  At Kashless.org for example, we do not allow anonymous posting through our site and do not have an erotic services category.  There are many features that drive toward greater transparency in the transaction between individuals.  In a free economic transaction that usually includes an in-person meeting, we believe transparency and user authentication is very important.  We have built features to support members sharing as much or as little about themselves as they are comfortable.  With more options relative to transparency, members of the marketplace have more tools with which to make their commerce decision.  You may still decide to deal with someone who you know nothing about, but at least you have some tools to make a more informed decision if you want to. 

Of course CL could add features that drive transparency in transactions as well.  I am sure their servers already have all the data (in fact CL created over 127 pages of documentation of on-line activity of Michael Andersen for the court trial).  The fact that they have decided to not expose any of that activity to the CL community is reflective off their far left slider on the liaise faire meter.  I understand that decision.  I have made a different decision.  In the end users of the marketplaces will figure out their preference. 

In the meantime I hope the politicians do not go too crazy on this one.  It is tempting for politicians at a time like this to propose sweeping regulation or vast new transfer of liability from users to network service operators.  This would be the WRONG reaction to this.  There is no way to legislate against criminals doing bad things. We already have enough laws preventing people from killing others.  Regulation and shifting liability would crush the development of marketplaces and the related commerce.  If you hear your politicians talking about such programs, tell them you would rather have the great web sites and want the police to enforce existing laws.

The whole Rails stack (2.2/2.3+) – unless you can point to a Rails app you have been responsible for building from top to bottom chances are you don’t have enough experience

GitHub and git - you have an account, you've forked and sent pull requests, hopefully they've been accepted.

You test.  A lot.  Preferably with shoulda.

Stuff that evolves from operating a large Web app -- full-text search (Sphinx, Solr), async job queues (ActiveMQ, delayed_job), DB sanity (foreign key enforcement, migration)

Consumed enough APIs to explain the ones you've liked and the ones that were just endless frustration

Pluses: Happily spent an entire day ‘building a slice’.  Don't need to ask what EBS means or how AWS probably implemented it.  Done role-based capistrano deployment.  Geocoded a million rows.

Go ahead, apply, it is fun http://kashless.org/home/jobs

or direct to the Ruby job http://kashless.catchthebest.com/apply/6398/

There was a dull pain growing in the back of my head.  “Is a half implemented, unsupported feature better than no feature at all?”  “What is the real goal of having discussions forums?” “Is the site better with or without them?”   The feature was poorly integrated into the site without clear goals and lacking company support.  Since we implemented Vanilla we also integrated FaceBook and Twitter which provide some of the community building aspects we had hoped to get through the forums.  It was clear to me that in the rush to check the feature box we had half assed it.  That led to a couple decision points

#1:  Keep current feature implementation? yes/no

#2:  Upgrade current discussion boards for cleaner technical integration? yes/no

#3:  Allocate Customer Service resources to make the discussion boards active and engaging?  yes/no

#4:  Is \TALK fulfilling our customer service goals?  yes/no

#5:  Is \TALK fulfilling our community building member to member goals?  yes/no

At Kashless, we like to have pride in everything on the site and be providing incremental member value with each thing we do, so the answers (after lots of spirited discussion) were:

#1:  NO, remove \TALK from site

#2:  NO, Vanilla doesn’t allow for single sign-on with our application, has a different look and feel and would require duplication of effort now being devoted to TenderAPP, so upgrading would not achieve any benefit.

#3:  NO, customer service resources are better spend fully supporting TenderApp for customer service.

#4:  NO, customer service is being well delivered through TenderApp.

#5: NO, community building goals are being pursued through Twitter, FaceBook and other applications at this time.  At some point in the future if we can design a well integrated set of features for member to member community building as part of Kashless.org, think about adding it then.

I would rather focus on great integration and support for features that provide clear member value than to simply have a box checked on a feature list somewhere.  In this case, taking the discussion boards out is best.

Now this:

looks like i won’t be able to anyway

Jordan, our new designer is really sprucing things up!  And now with Gravatar support ya know!