SwapYourShop offers a pretty interesting proposal: you move to a new city potentially in a new country and another person moves into your home for the same time period. You work for your current employer in the other person’s office and vice-versa.

Some of the reasons listed why swapping is a good idea include:

• You’ll be immersed in a new lifestyle or culture without the worry of finding another job when you return.
• You’ll have the opportunity to travel beyond your swap city on weekends and/or before and after your swap.
• You’ll make friends from around the world.
• You’ll be creatively influenced by new experiences and observations.

SwapYourShop has created an overview for employers which should help overcome the objections on this new type of work arangement.

It seems like the service focuses mainly on larger companies but this type of arrangement could work well for startup founders as well. I’d love a chance to “test” out a few other cities as I decide where I want to call home for my startup. And I am sure other startup founders might like to test out NYC as well.

From what I can tell, the site is built in Drupal. I think for a site like this, Drupal could become a bit limiting as they will want to expand on the types of content and depth of content across the site. Swappers should be required to create blogs and/or media (e.g. photos, videos, etc.) while they are on their swaps.

SwapYourShop is an interesting concept and I look forward to watching their progress. They will need to get a large database of willing swappers to make the program work. It would also be smart for SwapYourShop to add a notification system so I can receive alerts when potential swappers signup that meet my criteria.

It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at the social lending industry in the U.S. Both Lending Club and Prosper are out with new updates that are worth taking a look at. It’s no shock that social lending has taken off during the current economic crisis. If you are new to social lending, check out our 3-part series.

Lending Club

Earlier this week, Lending Club Sr. Director, Product Strategy Rob Garcia posted an update on the company’s progress. Rob noted the following stats:

• $1 billion in loan demand (these are people requesting loans)
• $95 million in funded loans
• 10,000 loans funded since June 2007

Lending Club provides a near real-time stats page that shows figures including: loans funded, total dollars funded, use for funds and investor return rates.

Prosper

Last month Prosper released findings that showed debt consolidation loans at an all time high. “Over the course of the last six months, debt consolidation loans have been ticking up, and in January hit an all time high of 59% of loans. Historically debt consolidation has tracked at approximately 45% of loans.”

The Prosper release also discusses the new credit card rules and notes that will be included in customer’s statements beginning this month. Chris Larsen, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Prosper noted, “We’ve always believed that credit cards provide a convenient payment mechanism, but are terrible as a financing solution. As more consumers start realizing it will take them approximately 30 years to pay off their credit card if they pay only the minimum payment each month, we think more will realize that they need to eliminate their credit card balances quickly. So seeing more people turning to Prosper to pay off destructive, high interest credit card debt is probably a trend that will continue for the foreseeable future.”

Have you used social lending tools to help with debt refinancing or new purchases? Leave a comment (you can post anonymously) about your experiences.

I have just returned from an intense 3-day media summit in Abu Dhabi. I took some photos and tweeted from the summit, but here are some key take-aways:

Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi is very ambitious. And is not shy to show it. The summit was held at a brand-new futuristic hotel built on top of a Formula-1 race track. Abu Dhabi has established the Abu Dhabi Media Company (with an unlimited fund for investments) and twofour52 to become a media center. Recent investments of ADMC include the very promising Vevo (Hulu for music videos, with Sony Music Entertainment) and Gazillion (which holds the rights to all Marvel Comics characters).

Carriers

Carriers are very afraid. Not from competition or government regulation. They are very afraid that they won’t be able carry all the upcoming heavy bandwidth from mobile web and smartphones with streaming media.

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Below are some of the latest jobs posted on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.

Featured Jobs:

• New Media Manager at Citrix Online
• Software Engineer at Microsoft Bing
• Software Development Engineer, Video On Demand at Amazon

More Jobs:

• e-Commerce & Online Marketing Guru at Quirky Inc.
• Senior Designer at formspring.me
• Frontend Developer at Unit 7
• Freelance Developer (ZEND PHP/WordPress) at HUGE

Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs today – only $10!

As with previous years, I met a ton of new people at the SXSW conference. I have to admit that I was very much looking to meet Dries Buytaert. Belgium-based Dries is the founder of the Drupal CMS. If you are a regular reader of CN, you know that all of our sites were in Drupal until a year ago when we shifted to Wordpress. I always liked Drupal but the admin interface just isn’t as usable as the Wordpress admin interface. Dries told me that the upcoming Drupal 7 release will have a redesigned admin interface.

Check out my video discussion with Dries below (make sure to watch in HD!). We talk about SXSW, the upcoming Drupal 7 release and the Drupal Gardens product. Drupal Gardens is a service provided by Acquia. Drupal Gardens is basically a hosted Drupal service similar to the Wordpress.com hosted service.

Dries notes that the Drupal 7 release has a focus on usability (they hired usability experts to help make the product stronger). They are also making lots of improvements for developers – including better APIs and better database abstraction layers. The Drupal 7 release is in alpha and they are hoping to get it out in public within the next few months.
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While at SXSW this week, I met with Shawn, the AOL product manager over the new AOL Lifestream product. AOL Lifestream brings together a variety of social services including Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, etc. The service is available on the iPhone, Android and on the desktop.

Interestingly, AOL now allows you to post status updates to AOL along with the other services you select. AOL Lifestream also allows you to follow places and find updates related to a place. So if you are interested in a certain hotel, bar, etc. you can subscribe to that location and any updates will hit your stream. To make these location pages very valuable, AOL will need to aggregate additional services including Yelp and even Google results (blog, web, news, etc.).

Similar to Google launching Buzz inside of Gmail to gain an instant audience, AOL Lifestream has the same instant audience as the new version of AIM includes the Lifestream product.

I asked Shawn about the comparisons to FriendFeed, his response is worth listening to.

Check out the video demo below.
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Today is the last day of the South by Southwest 2010 interactive conference. I will probably do a wrap-up post although overall this year felt very different for me than the previous years. Here are a few more photos that I snapped over the last few days. It seems like I didn’t miss much at the keynote judging from the other posts I’ve read.

If you were at the conference, what’s your take? What were the best moments? What could the conference improve on?

It’s the squid! Scott Beale from Laughing Squid

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