Swapstar joins crowded community classifieds race

Swapstar, a three-year old Silicon Valley (Fremont) start-up has launched a community community advertising portal, and is looking for between $2 and $3 million in venture capital, according to VentureWire (sub req).

We wish them luck, for this is a pretty crowded field, and the site is looking pretty bare — or at least judging from the few samplings we tried. It doesn’t have anything for Fremont, its own town, and San Jose had slim pickings — guess it’s still early days.

Bigger question: How many more of these sites can really survive and thrive? We’ve written about a handful of others here and here, and then there’s the host of overlapping sites, some mentioned here.

Meanwhile, not a peep about Swapstar in blogs tracked by Technorati. Swapstar wants to help users trade products too. Shame it couldn’t snag the name Swapster.com.

Full disclosure: Author, Matt, works for the Mercury News. It’s probably obvious for most that the Merc also has a local classifieds business, but we want to explicitly bring that to readers’ attention as we increasingly find ourselves writing about companies that are potential competitors. We’ll try our best to remain objective!