Announcing project 'Monumental May'

People are already sharing over £8,000 ($11,500) worth of stuff on thingloop, but we know there's a lot more out there waiting to be shared.

That's why today, we're announcing project 'Monumental May': our aim is to get people to have loaded over £100k ($144k) worth of stuff onto thingloop by the end of May.

Is it possible? We think so. But we need your help. Want to be part of Monumental May? Here's a few ways you can help:

1. Sign up to thingloop, if you haven't already; it really is pretty cool!
   
2. Connect with your friends, and upload info on items you're willing to share
   
3. Suggest the thingloop facebook page to all your friends
   
4. Use the share links at the top of the home page to spread the word
   

You can keep track of the progress of Monumental May by checking out the running total on the homepage.

Other News ... We're really keen on getting your feedback, that's why we'll shortly be incorporating a feedback feature directly onto the website.

In addition, we're investigating ways of polling users to find out which new features they'd most like to see. We'll keep you informed.

New feature - we're valuing your items, track how much you're saving

We've started placing approximate valuations on thingloop items so that you can:

• See the value of your sharing network, i.e. all the stuff people are sharing with you
  
• Track how much you're saving by borrowing
  
• Track how much people are saving by borrowing from you
  

The new statistics can be viewed by looking at your profile and groups.

Caveats

There are a couple of things that should be noted:

1. The valuations are estimates (see the next section for more info).
   
2. We are not currently able to value manually entered items, only auto-searched items from the web.
   

How are we doing this?

This is the boring bit, so skip it if you're not interested!

Basically, we search for pricing information during web searches, and choose the current lowest price for the item. This means that the estimates will be on the low side, e.g. the average DVD will be valued at maybe around £3 or £4 pounds, unless it's a new release.

Consequently, most of the values provided are on the conservative side, and may undervalue some of your items. We apologise for this, but feel it is better to underestimate than to provide wildly inflated valuations. The figures still provide a good valuation of the activity within your sharing network.

We are hoping to enable valuations of manually entered items in the near future as well. Watch this space.

New feature - sharing with friends!

We've just updated the site to add our latest feature on thingloop - the ability to share with friends and lists of friends, rather than just groups. We're pretty excited as we're aware that the group-centric sharing was too restrictive for many people.

There are a number of other improvements included in this release as well. We hope you like it.

Follow us on twitter

Yep, we're on twitter, thingloop, which may be the easiest way to keep up with all the news, new feature releases, etc, on thingloop.