Suppose you want to buy something from one of the online stores, but would like to share the initial shipping costs with someone. For example, you would like to get a cheapbytes CD or buy a cheap book and the relative cost of shipping is prohibitive. Ideally, you would walk around the Wean hallways shouting "who else wants to buy some stuff at amazon.com today?".
morpp (mail-order-RPP) saves your vocal cords in this kind of situation. You tell it that you want stuff from amazon.com, and if there is someone else who told it it wants stuff from amazon.com beforehand, it will let you know. Now you can team up and make the order.
Let's work through an example: suppose you want to buy the Lamport latex
book. You search and find that the cost is reasonable at either books.com
or www.bn.com. Next, you tell morpp that you would like to buy this item
from either of these vendors:
morpp want Lamport www.bn.com books.com
[current morpp location is:
here].
As you can see, the item and vendors can be any string.
Now, there is a chance that you are the first one to want stuff from these stores, so nothing seems to happen.
However, if in the future somebody else "wants" anything from either www.bn.com or books.com, they will be given your name (morpp uses user-id's so you don't have to type them in and for easy id-to-email mapping). Simple. morpp will also email you, and zephyr you, if this happens.
If you are just about to place an order, you can do:
morpp ordering amazon.com
This has the same effect as doing a "want" for this vendor, without actually adding any records to the database. All users with matching records will be reported, as well as mailed and zephyred to. This will also send a zgram to the instance "consumerbites.morpp".
Once you get the item (or decide to give up on it), do:
morpp got lamport
so you won't be notified about it in the future. Note that other items you may "want" are still stored and will produce reports, if applicable.
In general, you may specify any vendor you like. But if you want to know
what current vendors are in morpp's database, type:
morpp vendors
or visit the morpp affiliate page.
For a list of other options, just type "morpp".
Also, since the success is a function of the number of users, feel free to pass on this message to people you know. The more users there are, the more you'll save!