On SocialWay, you can find all kinds of things that you would prefer to borrow and not buy. If you do not find what you are looking for, you can put it on your wishlist and see if there are any matches. You can also share your own things to lend or give away, with control over who can see your items.

You can also see the environmental impact of your SocialWay activities through the Emissions Saved and the SocialWay Rootprint^TM figures.

Posting items is a way of promoting waste reduction – if you did not post the items that you no longer want or need, the people who need them will buy them. Sharing your stuff will help you reduce your carbon footprint - the amount of carbon dioxide that your lifestyle generates. SocialWay can help you give away things you want to while sitting at home. It is a way of sharing things you own with people you know would care for them as well as you do. Posting things also fosters the SocialWay community.

The privacy settings define who has access to a particular listing. The listing could be an item, wish or profile information. You have the following options:

• Private. Use this if the listing is only for your eyes. It will be visible only to you.
• Public. Use this to let your listing be visible to everyone.
• Custom. Use this to customize your choice of who can view the listing:
  • Friends.Only your friends on socialway can view the listing.
  • Community. Allow members of chosen communities to view the listing.

You can create a community on SocialWay. Make this community moderated if you want to limit its membership to a particular set of people. When you post an item, you can either make it public or you can set the privacy setting to be this community.

SocialWay members who participated in a transaction with you give you a “rating” that indicates their overall level of satisfaction with the interaction. It is an indicator of your trustworthiness on SocialWay. The options available for rating are Awful, Poor, Fair, Good, and Excellent.

To contact a person on SocialWay, browse their home page. Under his/her picture, you will see a message icon. Selecting that icon will allow you to send an e-mail message to that person.

To report any bugs or problems with the website, send email to: feedback@socialway.com
If you need help, send email to: help@socialway.com
To report abuse, send email to: report-abuse@socialway.com

Goto the sign up page join SocialWay.

Click on the Forgot username or password? link at the top right hand corner of the SocialWay page, and enter the email address that you use on SocialWay in the resulting page. A new password will be generated and sent to you at that email address.

Click on the My Page link that is visible in the upper right corner of all SocialWay pages. Then click on the Account Settings link. You can see the facility for changing your password at the bottom of the page.

Click on the Settings link that is visible in the upper right corner of all SocialWay pages. The default privacy settings for the items that you post and your wish list can be found at the top of the page. Note that the default privacy setting is the privacy setting you will see on the pages where you add an item or make a wish. You can always override this setting at that time.

The default setting indicates your usual mode of behavior when you advertise anything. For example, in general when you make a wish, you may want everybody on SocialWay to be able to view it and respond if they have it. Therefore, the default privacy setting for items on your wish list may be Public. However, you may want only your school group to know that you are interested in reading “The Sorcerer’s Stone”. In that case, when you place it on your wish list, you can always override its privacy setting from Public to Custom-Community. The same holds true for items that you want to lend/give away.

Click on the Settings link that is visible in the upper right corner of all SocialWay pages. You can turn on/turn off the email notifications and reminders here. The Email Notification Settings control when and what emails you will receive from the SocialWay network.

Click on the My Page link that is visible in the upper right corner of all SocialWay pages. Then click on the Edit link next to the About Me section heading. Enter information in all the fields to create your profile. You can use the privacy settings to control who can see your profile information.

To discontinue your membership, please send an email to help@socialway.com. To help us improve, please also send us the reason you are discontinuing.

Everything that you buy has an environmental impact in terms of CO₂ emissions. By sharing things rather than buying you can reduce these emissions. SocialWay Rootprint^TM is a measure of emissions saved through your activities on SocialWay. For ease of understanding, this number is also translated into the number of trees that would absorb the emissions that you saved. You also attain SocialWay levels based on the number of SocialWay trees you have “grown”.

Every transaction that you do on SocialWay saves carbon dioxide emissions - whether you lend or borrow, giveaway or receive an item. You can save more emissions by becoming an active member of SocialWay and by spreading the word. Post more of your stuff; invite more friends, neighbors, colleagues to use your stuff; find more people to post their stuff so that you can borrow rather than buy. Also, when you post an item, make sure you place it in the right category. The emissions saved depend on the category of an item. It is amazing how much your SocialWay tree can grow through these actions. Borrowing or lending just one book can grow your acorn to a 2-year old tree.

The emissions saved figure indicates how many kilograms (1 kg. = 2.2 lbs.) of carbon dioxide you have saved overall through your sharing activity on SocialWay. This number includes emissions of other greenhouse gases converted to an equivalent carbon dioxide number.

Greenhouse gas emissions increase the concentration of these gases in the Earth’s atmosphere contributing to global warming. Major sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions include the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation, and the destruction of forests. ‘Carbon Footprint’ is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. An average American household has a carbon footprint of over 19 tons of CO₂ per year.

What do you do as an individual that contributes most to your carbon footprint? It is widely accepted that direct emissions from home energy use and driving are the biggest culprits. This is why the emphasis on hybrid cars, green electricity, compact fluorescent lamps etc. While direct energy use is indeed the biggest contributor and every individual should make every effort to reduce it, it is not the complete picture.

According to the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), emissions that you're directly responsible for account for just 40 percent of your total. “The larger part comes from everything else you buy and do. Your clothes, for instance. The songs on your iPod. The food you eat. For all of these things are made, grown or transported with the help of fossil fuels. So is the bike with which you may idealistically pedal to work. So are the solar panels.” Research conducted by Carbon Trust of UK has given similar results.

Reducing the remaining 60% of the total footprint requires buying fewer things. But you do need to eat, wear clothes, go to work and yes, listen to music. How can you reduce your footprint without turning into an ascetic?

SocialWay helps by utilizing the stuff that everyone already owns more efficiently – lend what you don’t need right now and borrow what you don’t really need to buy. The “Emissions saved” figure tells you how many kgs. of CO₂ you have saved through your sharing activity on SocialWay. See the next answer for how the emissions saved figure is computed.

Each and every thing that we use must be manufactured and transported to our house. Once it has served its useful lifetime, it must then be disposed off eventually. The entire lifecycle of an item, including the manufacture, transport, usage and disposal phases, leads to greenhouse gas emissions during each phase. The “emissions saved” on SocialWay is computed for the manufacture, transport and disposal phases; i.e., all phases except the use phase. So, for example, if you borrow a DVD player, the emissions that you save are those for manufacturing, transporting and disposing off a new DVD player. The use phase emissions (such as the electricity consumed) are not counted towards the emissions that you save. The emissions saved figure includes both borrow/receive as well as lend/giveaway activities since in both cases you prevented a new item from coming into existence and thus contributed to saving the overall emissions. The reduction in just your personal carbon footprint would require counting the emissions saved only for your borrow/receive transactions.

SocialWay uses the EIO-LCA (Environmental Input Output – Life Cycle Assessment) model for the environmental impacts of producing goods and services as published and made available by eiolca.net of the Carnegie-Mellon Green Design Institute. (Any errors in the application of this model are entirely ours and the CMU Green Design Institute is in no way responsible.). The emissions saved numbers are gross estimates and as the EIO-LCA model and the SocialWay model based on it evolve, the estimates could change. SocialWay reserves the right to change the emissions saved numbers as and when the model is updated.

You need to pick a category for your item to get a better estimate of emissions saved. Here is a description of each category. Pick the closest match for your item based on the description:

What do the emissions saved really mean in terms that you can understand and relate to? To answer this question, we have translated the carbon dioxide emissions you have saved into trees. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, a process also known as carbon sequestration. The number of trees in your Rootprint^TM indicates the equivalent number of trees that would be needed to absorb the co2 emissions that you saved on SocialWay.

Every SocialWay member starts with a virtual acorn, and as they save emissions through their SocialWay activity, the acorn sprouts into a sapling which then grows into a tree – in fact, grows for 25 years! The virtual tree growth is based on actual carbon sequestration numbers for CO₂ absorbed by an oak tree as it grows every year to an age of 25 years (from a document by U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration). If your Rootprint^TM is a 10-year old tree, it means that you have saved as much CO₂ on SocialWay as a real 10-year oak tree would have absorbed over its lifetime as it grew from a sapling into a 10-year old tree.

SocialWay is not planting real trees. Also, real trees have many more benefits than absorbing carbon dioxide so your Rootprint^TM is not a substitute for planting real trees. What your Rootprint^TM does is give you a tangible sense of how much emissions you have saved through your SocialWay activities.

As you save carbon dioxide emissions and your Rootprint^TM tree keeps growing, you keep moving up the SocialWay Rootprint^TM levels. The virtual tree grows based on actual amount of CO₂ absorbed by a real oak tree as it grows (from a document by U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration).

• Acorn: Everyone starts out as an Acorn until they perform at least one transaction.
• Sapling: The first transaction grows an Acorn into a Sapling and stays that way until the tree is 5 years old.
• Young Oak: When the tree is 5 years old, the user becomes a Young Oak and stays that way until the tree grows to be 15-years old.
• Mature Oak: At 15 years, the user becomes a Mature Oak and stays that way until the tree is 25-years. At 25-years, the tree is full grown and the user gets another acorn.
• Garden: When the user has more than one tree they have a Garden and stay that way until they have seven trees that are each 25-years old.
• Grove: When the user has grown seven trees to 25-years old each, they get a Grove. Each grove represents 7 mature oaks.
• Urban Acre: When the user has accumulated eight groves, they get an Urban Acre. The 56 trees required for an urban acre are based on recommended tree density for urban areas by American Forests (40% tree cover) and the average canopy size for a 25-year old oak reported by VNLA. Once the user has several acres, the SocialWay Rootprint^TM is measured in number of acres, where each acre has 56 mature oak trees.

Rootprint^TM levels are not related to the user ratings denoted by red stars on the website. The user rating for a SocialWay member indicates the experience that other users had while transacting with this user and is an indicator of how trustworthy the user is. A high rating indicates that everyone liked interacting with this user, they took good care of the items and were timely in giving/receiving the items. The SocialWay Rootprint^TM levels indicate how active a user has been and how much carbon dioxide emissions they have saved. It is quite possible for someone to have a low SocialWay Rootprint^TM level and a high user rating. It is possible but unlikely for someone to have a high SocialWay Rootprint^TM level but a low user rating – if most people dislike interacting with an individual, that individual cannot reach a high number of transactions.

We can fetch the item details from the Amazon website, if you provide the ASIN (Amazon Identifier) or ISBN number for the item while posting the item. You can go to Amazon website and search for your item. If you want to post a book, look for ISBN or ASIN number on the amazon product detail page. For any other item like DVDs/CDs, look for ASIN.

You can also enter the ISBN code directly from the back cover of your book. However, we recommend you use the Amazon website for the code, as for non-U.S. ISBN codes we may not be able to fetch the details automatically. If you cannot find your item on Amazon, you can provide another some other appropriate URL for your item under the Detailed Description field. People will be able to click on the URL to see the details.

The emissions saved are a basic part of your SocialWay Rootprint^TM. Emissions saved vary by the kind of item – the material it is made from, processes involved in producing it, its size and weight etc. Item category is used for computing the emissions saved. Category ‘Other’ has the lowest emissions saved value among all categories, so it is worthwhile picking the right category.

If you want to browse all items in a particular category, say books, use the category “Book” in Advanced search. You can get to Advanced Item Search by going to Items->Search Item. All items visible to you in your country that have the category “Book” will be returned. If you want to see books in all countries choose the appropriate Country option in Advanced Item Search.

You may have just posted the item. The search index updates every few minutes, and it may be that you performed the search before the index was updated with your new posting. Otherwise, it may be that the item is posted as not available for trade, in which case also it will not show up in the search results.

Your "Items" count is the number of items currently posted by you on SocialWay that are available for transactions.

You can bookmark an item, if you do not want to request it immediately but want to check out later. You can see all such items under "My Bookmarks".

The International Standards Book Number is a unique identifier for commercially used books. Every book (except reprints) receives its own ISBN. The ISBN is a 10- or 13-digit number used for identification.

The ISBN is always found on the back cover, near the bar code. It will also be listed inside the book, on the same page as the copyright and publisher information. It is always labeled ISBN (e.g. ISBN 0-00-470779-6).

For a more detailed description of the ISBN see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN

The Amazon Standard Identification number is a product identification number used by Amazon and its partners. ASIN is valid only for products within the Amazon network.

Every product sold on Amazon.com has as ASIN number assigned to it. For books with an ISBN, the ASIN and ISBN are the same. Books without any ISBN number are also assigned ASINs.

For a more detailed description of the ASIN see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIN

There is a lending duration for each item. When that duration is reached, in your home page Messages section you will see "Item I need to get back (1)" and the link will take you to the recent transaction page where the transaction is listed. If you want to see the due date before it is due, goto Trades->Recent Transactions.

On the due date, you will see the following reminder on your home page: "Item due to return (1)". Also, 3 days before the return date (calculated based on the lending duration from the date the request was accepted), a reminder email will be sent to you. Please check My Page->Settings to ensure that reminder emails are turned on. if you want to see the due date at any other time, goto Trades->Recent Transactions and in the dropdown choose "Items I borrowed/got".

Goto Trades->Recent Transactions and in the dropdown choose "Items I borrowed/got". Click on Renew for item that you want to renew. A renewal for an item is the same as making a new request for it. The owner can Accept/Deny the renewal request same as any other request to borrow.

You can see the list of all outstanding item requests that you have to respond to under Trades->Item Requests->Requests I received.

You can see the list of all outstanding item requests you have made under Trades->Item Requests->Requests I made.

You can see the list of all items that you have borrowed and not yet returned under Trades->Recent Transactions->Items I borrowed/got.

You can see the list of all items that you have lent and that have not yet been returned under Trades->Recent Transactions->Items I lent/gave. Note that this list will also include all items that have been given away by you where you have not yet rated the transaction.

You can see the list of all completed transactions under Trades->Transaction History. The different categories of completed transactions are "Items I lent/gave", "Items I borrowed/got", "Requests denied to me", and "Requests declined by me". Note that a transaction on a borrowed/lent item is complete only when you have returned/accepted the item and rated the person with whom the transaction was made.

Under Trades->Recent Transactions->Items I lent/gave, you can find the transaction on that item, and choose to "Receive" the item. This will make it available for borrowing again.

Please contact that person to request them to return the item. You can also give them a user rating that reflects your experience. Under Trades->Recent Transactions->Items I lent/gave, you can find the particular transaction, and choose to rate that person on that transaction. The options available to you are Awful, Poor, Fair, Good, and Excellent.

SocialWay does not intervene in disputes between its members. We do suggest though that you talk to the borrower and try to resolve the dispute. Also, you can give them a user rating that reflects your experience since this will help others in making a decision in the future. Under Trades->Recent Transactions->Items I lent/gave, you can find the particular transaction, and choose to rate that person on that transaction. The options available to you are Awful, Poor, Fair, Good, and Excellent.

SocialWay does not intervene in disputes between its members. We do suggest though that you talk to the lender and try to resolve the dispute. Repairing or replacing the damaged or lost item is recommended. This will also help you in maintaining a good user rating and getting future lenders to trust you.

Your "Transactions" count is the total number of transactions that you have participated in, as a giver or a taker or a borrower or a lender, since the time you joined SocialWay.

To organize your friends, you can create appropriately named groups, and allocate friends to groups. You will see the Create a Group box in the lower left hand corner of the Friends page. Once the group is created, you can select the friends that are to be in that group. Each friend can belong to more than groups. You can also assign a friend to a group at the time that you accept their invitation to be linked.

Deleting a group does not affect your network of friends at all. The friends in the group will not be deleted from your network.

A moderated community is one to which membership is based on the approval of the administrators of the community. To join this community, you have to be invited, or your request to join has to be approved by an administrator of the community.

An unmoderated community is one that you can join without needing any approvals from the administrators of the community.

If the people from your workplace share a common domain name for their email address (say xyz.com), then when you make the community moderated, you can set the domain to be xyz.com. Now when anyone from your work, say mary@xyz.com requests to join the community, she will be automatically added as a member, without requiring your approval.

All communities on SocialWay can have more than one administrator. Any administrator can approve/decline requests to join the community, as well as send out invites to people.