I recently got an email from a staff memeber of YHIW or YouHaveIWant.com, a new classified service. I get a lot of similar emails and sometimes I just plain don’t have time to look at the site and sometimes I think the site is dumb so it becomes a case of “If you can’t say anything nice…” but I do check them all out and I thought that YHIW warranted a closer look.

It is a classified site, determined by location where every post is no longer than 140 characters long. They try to keep it anonymous by giving you as many options to let buyers contact you as possible including Twitter and Facebook.

You can post “Haves” which are items you are looking to sell or give away or “Wants” which are items that you are looking to buy. The system will let you know when they find matches for either post and then buyers can contact you via Facebook, Twitter, SMS or email.

In their own words:

Tell us what you ‘Want’ or ‘Have’ in a sentence. The YHIW matching system will continuously analyze other messages as they come in and present you with the ones that match your requirement.

If you are online, you will be able to chat directly & anonymously with the other matching user through the YHIW Chat system (or telephone). else we can relay their message to you via Email/SMS/Facebook/Twitter/RSS.

You dont have to search every day, we will search for you. You connect directly and instantly with the other person, and your Identity is revealed to the other party only when you decide.

No Spam. No Scams. Connect, Communicate and Decide, How you want to take it forward

How

I logged in to the Beta version of the site. Now I understand how the site is supposed to work and also that they are in Beta so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt that everything is not yet up in working condition. Right now, there isn’t a whole lot of point to the site other than really short classifieds but I can see some potential.

For instance, if I listed a Have and the site could automatically tweet out that item on my Facebook and Twitter accounts (which I would have linked in this scenario, something you can’t do with the site now), they they provide a fee free platform where a user could see my tweet and Facebook post, click through to the YHIW post and then contact me anonymously through the method of their choice.

But even as I say that, I can’t see how this site offers me anything more than simply posting my “Have” on Twitter and Facebook directly would give me. I like the idea of posting wants, especially as a collector, I have a long list of wants I’d love to post somewhere but I’m still not sure what edge this free site gives me over just posting it myself somewhere random.

And how anonymous is their contact if they are contacting me through Facebook or Twitter? Aren’t they seeing my username in either case?

In summation, I do think that the idea is very cool. People have long been trying to come up with a reliable way to buy and sell over sites like Twitter and Facebook and this is definitely a step in the right direction. But as the site is right now in Beta, it seems kinda, well, pointless. But I’m hoping that will change as the site moves out of Beta.

I am going to ask the staff member who contacted me to give us a little more info on how they plan for the site to work in the future in the comments but, in the meantime, the site is free to try so please feel free to play around with it. Maybe I am just missing the potential so please feel free to enlighten me below.