EDGE Dallas

A new Facebook app is aiming to be an online marketplace for secondary market weekend swapping in the Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove this summer. The app lets users sell and swap weekends with their friends.

Designed especially for Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove, the recently launched Facebook app is called Summer-Share.com and allows users to plan their vacation schedules this summer. It provides a visualization showing which of your Facebook friends will be out in the two gay summer resort towns with you.

Most renters on the Fire Island communities rent one out of four or one out of two weekends during the summer (a "quarter" or "half" share). The variability in summer schedules was the impetus for the app. House administrators, or "house mothers," can use it to keep track of guests on a weekend-by-weekend basis.

The app aims to be an online marketplace for swapping weekends too. Users can use Summer-Share to sell or swap their weekends with friends or put weekends up for sale publicly.

"Listing your summer schedule and sharing that with your friends was such a void in the community," said the app’s creator, Jason Fleetwood-Boldt. "Doing this using the Facebook platform is a natural fit since getting a share on Fire Island is so fundamentally social. Once the user logs in, Summer-share.com is able to pull the user’s list of friends right from Facebook. This lets you share your weekend information only with people you know are friends."

This is the next step in the long road toward renters communicating among each other. As a longtime veteran of Pines shares, I can remember the days when we relied on phones to communicate. Then there was email. Then texting. But it was always hit-or-miss, so I have to welcome Summer-Share as a boon to the laborious work of visiting the Pines or Grove.