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[glynor]

Good stuff!

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/other/lala.ars

Lala.com is a new service that brokers trades between people with CDs they'd rather not have. It allows people to exchange those discs for more interesting material, and to do it for $1.75—including shipping. The premise is a simple one: each user lists the CDs that they are willing to trade, then creates another list of CDs that they want. Each time that someone ships out a CD he requested by someone else, he gets one from his "want list" in return. Lala acts as the middleman, taking $1 for each trade and charging another 75 cents for shipping.

The service is fun to use; it provides the excitement lacking in more straightforward commercial transactions. Without knowing which album might come next from the want list, each trade is a surprise, and a daily stream of packages in and out of the house makes the mailman's visit that much more exciting.

The interface is slick, too. Adding albums to either your "want list" or "have list" is as simple as typing the artist name and the first few letters of the album title. Lala presents a list of options, updated in real-time as you type. Simply click on the album in question and it's added to your desired list. Allowing your mouse to hover over any album listing throughout the site pops up a box on the right side of the screen with album art and track listing—a nice touch, and one that makes it simple to browse through lists of other members' discs without loading new pages every time you want more details on an album.