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!

(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.

Today’s update, which I hope is less controversial than the major leaguer whose birthday is today, brings some needed improvements to the posting process, with helpful steps along the draft -> upload photos -> publish path. It looks great and works great; I’m really happy with the improved usability.

The other major change addresses message functionality. Mainly, viewing all messages related to an item is much, much nicer — but there were a pile of smaller improvements here, especially focusing on organization and navigation. Also, messages now get chunked off in an email: since messages can’t be sent until an offer is accepted, this is one area where dibs.net reduces email volume.

All of these recent changes have made dibs.net a solid and feature-full app. After one or two more solid days of bug fixes and testing, I think I’ll be ready to slow down the release cycle and begin the maiden voyage with a local sale.

Things are looking great so far. I really appreciate all of the feedback I’ve gotten already. There were far fewer critical bugs than expected, which I like to think reflects well on my development skill.

Some small changes on dibs.net tonight include:

• Major changes to registration — should be a less error-prone process now
• Big update to profiles — now allows a note from the user
• Emails are less likely to be flagged as spam
• Image uploads are fixed
• Menu links are slightly changed/fixed
• Better promotion of the “vanity domains” feature, e.g., http://kevin.dibs.net
•  A couple backend fixes

I’d also like to say thanks to my Mom for her feedback today

I’ll be rolling out nightly bug fixes for the rest of the week. Send feedback and problems to support@dibs.net, motivating and congratulatory personal notes to kevin@centropy.com, beer and pizza to my home address.