TOS Review Lobster Network

Like many homeschoolers I have many, many books; I have books that I have forgotten I owned, and I have loaned books to people and forgotten about them (the books, not the friends). More than once I've purchased curriculum only to find one of my friends had it to loan.

LobsterNetwork is a social networking utility that helps you keep track of your stuff and, if you choose, to advertise it within communities of like-minded people or friends. You can use it to borrow a movie from your friend, and it will help you keep track of the loan. Or you can lend your items out to other people. Similarly, you can use it to buy, sell, trade, or give items out to other people.

Another use for Lobster is to keep an inventory of your belongings for insurance purposes. You can change the setting for items allowing others to see them or keeping them private so only you can see them.

This is a great tool for homeschool co-ops to share resources. You can create a private community which allows you to control who has access to the community. Users can then borrow, etc among each other in the group, and you don't need to worry that 'the whole world' can view your inventory.

 We use Tapestry of Grace as our core curriculum, and it uses a number of books some of which are hard to find or expensive to purchase. With Lobster everyone in the co-op could enter their inventories, and we could search for particular books within our community potentially saving our precious book budget for those classics we want to own for ourselves.


Your ability to search in different ways makes it easy for you to find the items you're looking for. You can search for items in the following ways:
* By Name
* By Category
* By Purpose (Lend, Trade, Free, Sale, or Wanted)
* By Distance – how close is it to you?

Lobster is extremely versatile and it's FREE. That's right, no cost to use it. The only down side I see is that I have to take the time to enter the information for all of my stuff (and then convince my friends to do the same!).

Be sure to read reviews written by other TOS Crew members here.

*I received this product for free so that I may offer my opinion of it.  No other compensation was received.