I have to admit, on first look, Bondsy’s idea just didn’t ring a bell with me. The tagline said, “A new way for friends to trade things you can’t put a price on”. But to me it sounded like just another iPhone app which lets you to trade stuff with your friends. ‘Meh’, I thought. But after a few minutes with the app, I voluntarily invited about a dozen close friends of mine who are iPhone users to get onboard with me on Bondsy.
Agree or not, there is always stuff that you own, which you haven’t had a chance to use in a really long time. Or the things which you know you are never going to use here after. But you keep them anyway, because a) you can’t really put a price tag on it, which you think is worthy enough or b) you don’t want to throw it away and you wish you could give it to someone who might actually make use of it. Could be your old iPod shuffle, that Nintendo-64 console, a discount coupon, or those sunglasses which you bought thinking they looked cool on you until your friends made fun of it.
Bondsy is exactly for trading things like these, and more. All you have to do is snap a picture, type in a one-line story about it along with the price tag and with one more tap, it gets listed on your profile. Bondsy sports a clean & elegant UI with pleasing colors and a smooth user experience. The home screen of Bondsy is similar to that of a social network feed with all activity listed chronologically on two tabbed views, one for ‘friends’ and another for ‘friends of friends’. Bondsy also lets you chat with item owners, comment/bid on listings and gives you a one tap ‘mark as grabbed’ button for the items you have listed.
The coolest thing about Bondsy is that it encourages freeform price tags for the items you list, which means you don’t necessarily have to enter a number as the price tag. So far, people have been asking for beer, bacon, hugs, kisses, dates and even two minute backrubs as price tags in exchange for the items they have listed on Bondsy.
Bondsy has a ‘no strangers’ policy, so the privacy setting for your listing has just two options either ‘friends’ or ‘friends of friends’. You can add friends through facebook or twitter, email, sms or by just searching their username and sending a friend request.
The only quibble with Bondsy is that it didn’t allow me to login with my Facebook or Twitter account. I had to type in my username, password and email address manually to sign-up. But the developers have been continuously improving and updating Bondsy. So I hope they add it in a future update. Another particular feature in Bondsy that I loved is their beautiful web profile page. Each Bondsy user gets a neat wishlist style public webpage. This is done so that the items you have listed can be shared anywhere on the web.
Bondsy is available for free on the App Store, and I honestly believe if everyone starts using it, the world would be a much better place with a lot of friendly useful exchanges happening. If you still need more convincing, you should definitely check out their fun user stories.