Alissa sent me her site to have a look at. She ran a site listing free samples in USA and Australia — FreeSamplesDirect.com, where you can get listing of free product samples. The site has a blog with new entries when the site gets updated, and RSS feed for those who wish to keep track the latest freebies.

There currently aren’t that many free samples in its Australian directory. However as the site has only started recently (domain registered in August 2007), hopefully there will be more freebies for the Aussies listed there in the near future.

My current favourite freebie site remains to be The Freebies Blog. The site has grown a lot since I last looked at it — 650+ feed subscribers according to FeedBurner! Thanks Teresa for doing a great job there!

Okay. Now the real reason I am writing this blog post is, that some changes I’ve made to OzBargain last week might put myself into competition with these sites. First of all, the fact — not everyone likes freebies. Sometimes you got to wonder why companies and manufacturers give out free samples or free promotional offers. After all, it is generally agreed that there is no such thing as a free lunch. So, as a recipient of these free samples, you are either

1. Doing marketing research for them, i.e. testing out “beta product”, or
2. Taking that first addictive bite so you might actually pay to get more later.

People who dislike these freebies voted against them on OzBargain, which generated some discussion and some proposal to remedy the issue. Basically at the end of discussion is — freebies should be separated from bargains and coupons, and an option to hide them in user preferences.

So I coded the solution in a few evenings, and from now on, as a registered OzBargain user (register yourself an account if you haven’t!) you can set up your own threshold for the number of minimum votes before the deal appears in listing. You can basically set the freebie type to a very high minimum vote threshold to filter out the free product samples that get posted on OzBargain.

However, there are always people who don’t care about being a test druid and would love to try out all the free samples — this link (and corresponding RSS feed) will list every freebies submitted to OzBargain. Hopefully the current setup will keep everyone happy.

Upcoming development tasks — migrating to Drupal 5.2 (OzBargain is currently on Drupal 4.7 with lots of mods), and implement a new theme. If you have any feedback and feature request, please post them to our announcement & feedback forum.