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Yard Bark

Yard Bark was a hyper local classified ad system active in the mid-2000s. The system operated on the premise that services like Ebay and Craigslist were inconvenient for people seeking to sell small things quickly. Other online personal selling systems such as the aforementioned required shipping or meeting people in weird places to fully execute a transaction.

Yard Bark's solution was to turn every workplace or school into a flea market. When you posted something for sale you posted to a section specific to your job place, but not by employer or company - by building.

A large building might have thousands of workers on different floors with people working for different companies. To transact a lamp sale finalized through Yard Bark for example, all you needed to do was to toss it in the car and go to work like on any other day. Once there you could transact during lunch hour with the buyer who might be just across the hall.

The service never really took off and in time I tinkered with the site and code to experiment with different angles. When I finally let the service decay apart completely its shtick was to exist as a place to list things for one day only. That is, you posted something for sale for anyone to respond to from anywhere, and within 24 hours the listing would self-delete. The idea here was to promote a fevered buyers market where people would learn to check out Yard Bark every day for deals that otherwise evaporated after that. For the seller, it was to be a non-managed way to "post and forget".

I have the original code bases for both iterations of the service laying around and like to think that one day I will put the necessary work into recrafting both iterations, perhaps under different brand names, and using Mumblecore HTML.