"What's awesome," mid-June edition

June 19, 2008

Greetings to the many new Bonanzlers that have signed up lately, continuing to make this party, er website, move alive by the day.

I'm too tired to program (plus my fancy new Dell computer keeps freaking out in 5-10 minute stretches with hard drive problems), so I'm making a quick stop to report on what's awesome this week.

The first point of awesomeness I'd like to mention is the tremendous volume of awesome applicants that we've gotten for our marketing intern position from Craigslist. Great scott, if only we'd gotten a fraction of this quality when we were posting openings for programmers last year, we could have programmed this site to pick up your camera, take some pictures, and set up your booth for you while you sip pina coladas. Unfortunately, we didn't get that quality of programming applicant, and the site won't pick up your camera, nor will it set up your booth for you... but I will offer you a digital pina colada. Drink up, party animal.

As it stands, I'm still reading through a sea of well-written cover letters, encouraging feedback, and email from genuinely humorous (in a good way) candidates. Good stuff and thank you to all -- I only wish that we had the budget to hire a team of interns. But we don't, and we ain't, so if you're still thinking about applying, please send your application soon.

Lucky for you, we've also managed to find time to squeeze in some exciting new features in the last week. Here's a few!

• Invite your contacts. We'd hardly be a Y2k8-worthy web site without allowing you to invite friends fetched from your Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo contacts list, would we? Try it from the "Invite My Friends" link in the "My Bonanzle" tab.


• Lookup prices or descriptions, from Yahoo or Amazon. One of my personal favorite features, we now allow you to automatically find both a description and a price for the items you're posting by using our item guesser to automatically grab items like yours from Amazon or the Yahoo! Shopping marketplace. Anyone got any ideas about a catchy name for the item description/price guesser? I'm told "Jeeves" is already taken.


• Buyers now buying! You may now touch the merchandise. Add items from any booth into your shopping cart (by dragging them in, or by clicking on the item, and then using the "Add to Cart" button) and buy away. When you go to checkout, you'll be able to make an offer on your terms -- set the price, the payment option, and whether you want it shipped or picked up (depending on what options the seller allows). Wheel and deal, bonanzlers.

Coming soon: better options for finding booths and users nearby you (and for finding users in general), a booth Facebook plugin, and faster picture load times. Woo-wee.