Responding to its users' desire for more restaurant review offerings, TripAdvisor announced Tuesday that throughout 2009, it will be adding features that will allow visitors to do more than review eateries on the site. So far, the site features 2 million reviews and ratings on 500,000 restaurants worldwide. To help users search through those more effectively, TripAdvisor added price, cuisine, and "recommended for" filters to its restaurant page Tuesday.
Also, the company has partnered with OpenTable.com to allow U.S. users to make a reservation directly on TripAdvisor's site. The company's new iPhone app, dubbed Local Picks, lets users find local restaurants and use the device's location-based technology to find restaurants nearby. More features will be announced later this year. Goodrec offers a similar service.
Online radio service Slacker Radio has launched five new stations in time for Valentine's Day. Its Broken Heart Radio station will feature "a melancholy mix of lost love and yearning with a touch of soulful redemption." Slow Jamz aims at getting you in the mood with songs from Marvin Gaye and others, while Rock Ballads Radio tries to bring you and your loved one back to the 1970s and 1980s. All of the company's Valentine's Day stations are live now.
XLR8 Mobile, a company that offers customizable widgets for sharing videos, music, and pictures across social networks, announced that it has changed its name to Dijit. The company's CEO, Eric Allen, claims the name change was the result of his company's "commitment" to developing new technology that allows users to share their original content and focus more on sharing. The company's new name was announced in conjunction with the release of a beta version of its widget platform.
Oodle, a network for online classifieds, announced Tuesday that it raised $5.6 million in funding from existing investors, Greylock Partners, JAFCO Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures. The company, which announced last year that it will power Facebook's Marketplace, will use the funding to form more partnerships. The Facebook Marketplace is scheduled to launch later this quarter.
Search marketing and analytic firm Enquisite, closed an $8 million round of financing that was led by Castile Ventures and Formative Ventures. According to the company, it plans to use the funding for product development and marketing efforts it hopes will expand its operation.
Today eBay launched a standalone Facebook app to let users browse eBay and show off their auctions to friends on the social network. This is hot on the heels of their slick "eBay to Go" Flash widget that made its migration to the Facebook apps platform late last month.
The new app lets you link up your eBay account to your Facebook profile and share items you've put up for auction with your friends, along with making your eBay watch list public to friends who are using the app. The integrated eBay search will pull up identical results to what you'd find when searching through eBay's basic search tool, although it's noticeably missing some of the nicer, advanced power user tools like being able to browse up to 200 listings at a time, and limit results by seller reputation.
Once you've found something that piques your interest, you can add it to your watch list (which cross-posts to your profile's mini-news feed), or share it via Facebook's two-pronged share tool. You can also click the "buy" link which will shoot you off to the item's auction page on eBay.
That's the entirety of the app, but let's take a minute to look at what's missing compared to Facebook's own Marketplace app and buying and selling infrastructure that already exists. The best way to do this is with a chart:
The bottom line is that this new app is a decent way to show off your eBay items, but not nearly as good looking or simple as the eBay to Go widget from a month ago. Sure it's more social than the widget, but it's not nearly as user friendly as the pre-existing marketplace service. If I were eBay, I'd be focusing on ways to create auction listings from within Facebook, along with ways to port over your current Facebook Marketplace listings.
Facebook's new "Marketplace" classifieds feature launched quietly this weekend, giving the social networking site's members the ability to post Craigslist-like ads and make them visible to their friends and "networks" (which, if you aren't familiar with Facebook, are based around regions, high schools and colleges, and companies). I gave it a quick run-through to test it out; here's what I found.
When you click on Marketplace, which is accessible by a link in the left sidebar (along with other Facebook staples like photos, groups, and notes) you are directed to the Marketplace homepage for your primary network, with tabs where you can navigate to the corresponding pages for your other networks if you're in more than one. In the image below, you can see the CNET network is the one displayed; I also have access to listings from my former university's network and to the NYC network. The interface is more or less just like the rest of Facebook--blue and white, without much clutter.
The interface for Facebook Marketplace.
(Credit: Facebook)Read on after the jump...
... Read moreVery recently, Facebook launched its new "Marketplace" classifieds ads feature, a potential rival to services like Craigslist. The service, according to a New York Times article, was supposed to go live on Friday. At least in the networks that I have access to, it wasn't actually available until Sunday night. (Facebook occasionally will roll out features to select school, workplace, or regional "networks" within the service before they become widely available. But it looks like now the Marketplace is available to everyone.)
Look for our review of Facebook Marketplace very soon.
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