Linkfest

It's Friday and I've had a long week at the day job (hence, few posts), so now I'm just lazy. Let the linkfest begin...

Lending Club comes out:

This is it. The great moment we have been working towards: expanding Lending Club beyond Facebook and making it available to anyone out there looking for better rates. We continue to enhance and support our Lending Club application in Facebook, but now, users don’t have to be in Facebook to use our site.

As part of our public launch, we are unveiling new features that will benefit the whole p2p lending community, whether you are a Facebook user or not.

Prosper Lending Review spots a Newsweek article on Prosper:

I find it interesting that peer to peer loans are compared against credit cards instead of banks or home equity loans. Matt wrote a good article back in July about when it makes sense to borrow from Prosper - Why would a borrower use Prosper instead of a traditional bank? He did not consider credit cards in his analysis but my gut tells me that credit cards are only going to beat banks or Prosper if you have a promotional rate. Generally credit cards are not a good place to carry a large balance. In fact, my personal recommendation is to never carry a balance on credit cards.

Press Piece - Borrowers ask cyber-friends to fund debts, dreams:

Never lend money to a friend, the old saying goes, but what about lending to a stranger a few keystrokes away?

The emergence of online communities has prompted some people needing funds to pay off debt or pursue their dreams to turn to cyber-friends to help them, rekindling people-to-people lending and investment opportunities that sidestep banks.

zcommodore looks at the percentage of funded listings in groups:

Periodically, I check how many listings there are on Prosper (2220 last check a few minutes ago) and how many are not in a group. Then I get out my calculator to find out the percent of "no group" listings relative to all available listings.