No, I’m not there. But Dibs.net is on the scene at Black Rock City, Nevada! Or at least, it’s there in some ethereal sense: I added Black Rock City to the system (did you know Google Maps doesn’t have a clue where it is?) so folks can post and search for stuff to trade all week long.

I’m also offering to add specific camps to the system if people will send me GPS coordinates for them, so you’d be able to quickly see what stuff is at which camp.

I very much support Burning Man and the ideas behind it. In fact, I think the goals of Dibs.net are pretty well inline with the goals of the event, and so I am hoping folks on scene will find Dibs.net useful for advertising their camp’s extra supplies and facilitating the barter system there.

Of course, Dibs.net is based around offers of money back here in the regular world, but there’s nothing to prevent people from posting things for $0, and others making offers other than money. It’s built right into the system.

And as always, Dibs.net is entirely free and non-commercial. Have at it, Burners!

We experienced some downtime this morning, approximately 7:00-9:30 AM PDT. Some of the dibs.net servers unexpectedly rebooted (something that you have to plan for in an environment like Amazon EC2). The outage would have been quite a bit shorter except for another problem that surfaced during startup, causing some services to not come back online automatically.

Unfortunately, until Amazon offers the ability to float an IP address, this sort of outage can hit any web application hosted on EC2. For the time being, however, fixing the startup scripts to decrease any outages should be sufficient for these early days of dibs.net.

(On this date in 1950, Gary Larson — cartoonist of The Far Side — was born.)

With all the activity around launch, promotion and marketing, I’ve only been able to accomplish a few things over the last week or so. Besides cleaning out several smaller bugs, tonight’s update addresses one area I think has been causing an initial WTF reaction when people first visit. For various reasons, all activities on the site have required login, and therefore, an account. So, when people land on the site and click nearly anything (Ask a Question, Make an Offer, etc.), they are prompted to login or create an account. Ugh… so rude. It’s time to let them do more.
The first step in resolving this is a feature I call Non-Member Questions. It works almost exactly the same as regular questions, except that:

• the user doesn’t need an account, and
• before the question is sent to the seller to be answered, the person who posted it has to confirm their email address.

Non-member questions are anonymous. (The seller cannot see their email address.) They are always public.

This can be enabled or disabled on a per-listing basis, and is currently disabled for all existing items in the system. To enable it, simply go to an item’s Edit Details page, check the box and save:

After I give this some time and any issues are resolved, the next step will be to allow non-member’s to make offers, which is a far bigger deal.
My goal with these non-member features is to make the site more attractive and usable before everyone in the world has an account. It’s all about effectively managing the communications between buyer & seller, and I think this is a step in the right direction.

Thanks a million to everyone I met and talked with and who would listen to my spiel about dibs.net at the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup tonight. As I was driving to DLA Piper this evening, I decided this was going to be my “P.T. Barnum” moment if I’m ever going to have one. (Not the “sucker was born every minute” P.T. Barnum, but the “extraordinary promoter” P.T. Barnum.) If you weren’t there, you missed a fun night: I gave $10 on the spot to everyone who would post something for sale within a couple weeks. And it’s not like I’m checking up on whether you follow though; no other strings attached. You win by getting a free lunch and dibs.net wins by spending ad money more wisely than Google ads. We all win by finding a better owner for the unused clutter that has collected in our lives.

The giveaway was a great hit and I had a blast talking to everyone and meeting so many interesting people so full of ideas. Tonight really made me remember why I moved here. There is so much enthusiasm and creativity around “ideas” here that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Sure, we all engage in a little wild-eyed hyperbole at these events, but I’d rather converse with a dreamer for a month than a closed-eyed cynic for a minute.

By the way, I took a small break from dibs.net development over the past few days to get the marketing machine rolling. Now that it’s set in motion, it’s back to some much needed features that should let more users participate here.

By the way, here’s a Truemor for ya: Guy Kawasaki didn’t ask me about the $10 I was giving away. Either he doesn’t need lunch money tomorrow or he’s got no stuff to sell It was great to finally see him, after missing out on the talk he did for an SVASE event last September.

Another Truemor: Guy spent $15k building Truemors? So much money! Dibs cost me $6k and that includes a $2400 iMac. Slap another star up the fridge baby, we’re going to celebrate at Red Lobster tonight!