OpenHive meets Facebook

Taking advantage of the Facebook Platform, Yitz and Harold did some mad late night hacking to get OpenHive integrated with Facebook. You can add a module on your Facebook profile that shows items you’ve recently added, and your friends can see your library right in Facebook. You can of course add items to your library in Facebook, and those will show up in your feed too (now how hot is that?). It still might be a little rough around the edges, but it’s usable, and it’s awesome! So add the app, tell your friends, and update your library!

OpenHive Launched for UChicago.edu

We’ve officially launched OpenHive for University of Chicago students today, to coincide with the beginning of Winter Quarter. Check it out at http://openhive.com, and sign-up using a uchicago.edu email address.

For those of you who were around for OpenHive 1.0 back in 2005, here are some new features we’ve added for the relaunch:

• In addition to searching for things in your “friends’” libraries, you can also join and search/browse in “Hives”. Hives are basically groups/communities that exist in real life, for example, a dorm or club. By joining a hive, you essentially get connected with everybody in that group, without having to add individual members as “friends”.
• You can now share computer games in addition to books, CDs and DVDs. Support for VHSs have been dropped (not that anyone would care…).
• Due to popular request, you can now set selling prices for items in your library.
• We’ve also added some new library management features, like searching within your library, and tagging items for organization.
• People and items can now be reviewed or commented on. So if someone agrees to meet with you to swap a book and doens’t show up, you can write him up for being a flake.
• …and other features, redesigns, and probably a handful of bugs!

Anyway, hope people find it useful, and feel free to leave us feedback with any questions or suggestions.

Where’s OpenHive?

If you’ve visited OpenHive.com lately, you might’ve notice that the site has been… well, hijacked by some ninja video. Turth be told, it wasn’t hijacked at all. A group of us aspiring Web 4.5 geeks have been rewriting OpenHive from scratch, and decided the inspirational video might keep you distracted while we worked.

Our original hope was to launch at UChicago, our home turf, before the beginning of the quarter (i.e. tomorrow) to help everybody find books and see which first year has the coolest library. Unfortunately, even though the site is mostly ready to go, we have some logistical issues to solve before we can actually launch. So, we’re currently in sneaky beta, and with the exception of a few lucky souls, we’re not able to make OpenHive publicly accessible just yet.

Anyway, we’ll keep you posted, and look forward to the day when we can share the new OpenHive with you all.