Ahh, it feels so good to be talking web 2.0 again. My girlfriend actually tipped me off to FiveLimes.com, and the gracious founders gave us a beta user account to go exploring. At it’s nuts and bolts FiveLimes is a social network for eco-friendly products and services, and a way for people that are interested in green products to share them with a community.

How it works
FiveLimes actually doesn’t really function like your typical social network, meaning it doesn’t feel like it’s all about your profile instead it focuses more on recommending and bookmarking eco-products. It’s kind of like del.icio.us meets facebook meets the green community. Del.icio.us in that you can bookmark products and share them with people, Facebook in that you can make friends and connect to other people, and the green community because well because it focuses on products that are eco-friendly. It works by just bookmarking products that you like and adding them to the FiveLimes database under different categories like Apparel, Cosmetics, Food, etc for people to search through. Essentially a user-generated central repository for all things eco-friendly.

How they make money
So following big brothers Google and NexTag FiveLimes is going to charge merchants, eco-friendly products only, to upload their products directly to the FiveLimes products database. This will allow a ton of exposure to new eco-friendly products to an audience that is very focused and relevent. FiveLimes is then going to charge these merchants on a Pay Per Click basis when a user clicks on the link to the vendor’s website. I for one think this is a nice alternative to google adsense or blaring flash ads. I’m not sure if this is a mix that is going fly with the green community but I definitely can see this as a niche that is different enough from myspace and facebook to coexist with them. For more info check out Mashable, they also did a a pretty good review on FiveLimes recently.

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