Classifieds listings have returned to Facebook, thanks to the social network's partnership with e-commerce service Oodle. With Facebook Marketplace's focus on making classifieds "social," the company hopes to give Craigslist a run for its money. But at least right now, it won't mean any new revenue streams for Facebook--it's powered by ads and sponsored listings, with no transaction fees yet.
You may recall that in mid-2007, Facebook launched its own "Marketplace" feature, but it never really caught on. Late last year, Facebook made it public that Marketplace would be relaunched with Oodle's collaboration.
It's different from other Oodle-powered classifieds systems (which include News Corp.'s MySpace): namely, it looks like a Facebook news feed. You can fill out listings as though they were the social network's own status updates, by choosing one of four options (sell, sell and donate proceeds to charity, give away for free, or ask for something). Then, it'll show up in your friends' news feeds as something like, "Caroline is selling a lightsaber." You can sell items to any Facebook member, though friends-only listings are on the way, and when someone looks at your listing they can also see, for example, how many friends you have in common. Oodle and Facebook hope that will boost the trustworthiness factor.
There's no payment system, which means that buyers and sellers currently need to negotiate a means of compensation. It does, however, leave the doors open for an internal Facebook payment system, something that is either in the works or on the back burner depending on who you ask.
Additionally, at this point, posting a classified on Facebook Marketplace is free. But the service is focusing at launch on the sale and exchange of material goods. You can't hunt for jobs or apartments on it yet--that's on the way, and Oodle representatives wouldn't say whether there may be fees for these listings. (Craigslist makes its money from real estate broker fees, for example.)
Oodle and Facebook are highlighting the "donate to a charity" option, which taps into the array of nonprofits reachable through the Network for Good (it also powers the popular "Causes" application on Facebook). While there are over a million registered 501(c)3 nonprofits in the listing, about 20 are launch partners that have agreed to promote Facebook Marketplace.
Classifieds start-up Oodle will be powering Facebook's official "marketplace," the company said Tuesday. Members will be able to use it just like any third-party app on the Facebook platform--the only difference is that this one is official.
"Turning the development and management of Marketplace over to an innovator in online classifieds will give users more advanced ways to create and share listings on Facebook," Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of business development, said in a release. "We're excited by the potential of the Oodle-powered Marketplace application to offer an engaging classifieds experience on Facebook."
Facebook launched its own Marketplace about a year and a half ago, a potential rival to the Craigslist juggernaut. But it didn't really take off, and though it was never formally pulled, Facebook decided to revamp it with Oodle to "further expand the functionality and breadth of the application."
It'll relaunch early next year. Facebook, meanwhile, has been working on developing a PayPal-like payment system for quite some time; it has yet to launch, but presumably could be closely integrated with an official classifieds service.
Oodle also has powered MySpace's classifieds since July.
News Corp.'s MySpace will relaunch its classified-listing section on Monday through a partnership with Oodle, the company is set to announce later in the day.
While it's no Craigslist, MySpace said its existing classifieds section pulls in a million visitors per month, and that the improved technology from Oodle--better search and filtering, more extensive ways to tweak listings--will ideally pull in more users.
Among the new features is a way for individual users to share listings with friends lists, which the company calls "social commerce." Considering MySpace's slant toward entertainment and music, this could turn into a choice spot for finding stuff like last-minute concert tickets--as well as friends to hit up that show with you.
In addition, other Oodle listings from across the Web will be listed alongside MySpace's own, bolstering the offering and potentially providing a worthwhile alternative to the Craigslist juggernaut. According to MySpace, this will mean more than 500,000 new listings every day. This is because Oodle's reach is big: currently, the site aggregates listings from just about everywhere but Craigslist, including eBay's Kijiji.
Rival Facebook already has a commerce section called Facebook Marketplace, which isn't one of the site's most popular or high-profile features but is nevertheless still alive and kicking. It might get a leg up when the service launches a much-anticipated payment system--currently anticipated for sometime next year.
Bye-bye, Expo. We, um, didn't use you.
(Credit: Windows Live Expo)This post was updated at 11:56 AM with comment from Microsoft.
Chalk one point up to Craigslist: Microsoft has decided to shut down Windows Live Expo, the classifieds service that it originally launched in February 2006.
Expo will disappear on July 31, a notice on the site explains. Until then, no new listings can be posted or extended, and no new accounts can be created. Microsoft representatives responded on Friday with a statement from the company: "We have learned a tremendous amount from our experience with Windows Live Expo and believe this decision, while a hard one, will serve to more effectively focus our resources towards other priority online service investments for our customers."
The most recent post on the Expo blog is from last September.
Online classifieds continue to be dominated by Craigslist, a scrappy start-up with a hippie attitude and a user interface worthy of 1997. The company is currently ensnared in a legal tiff with major investor eBay over the auction giant's in-house classifieds site, Kijiji.
In a tiff over its 28.4 percent share in Craigslist, auction giant eBay has filed suit against the online classifieds site in a Delaware court of chancery. According to Reuters, eBay has accused Craigslist's board of directors of diluting its share.
The court confirmed that eBay filed its complaint Tuesday afternoon but could not provide further details, because the suit was filed under seal.
In a phone conversation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said, "We're still trying to digest it," and recommended contacting CEO Jim Buckmaster for further comment. Buckmaster did not immediately reply to an e-mail inquiry.
Newmark, Buckmaster, and the Craigslist company are reportedly named as defendants in the suit, the Reuters article asserts.
You don't mess with Craigslist, apparently.
A fan-run blog called Craigslist Blog has been served a takedown notice from the massive classifieds site, according to a post from blogger Tim White on Thursday.
Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO
(Credit: Craigslist)White posted the e-mail he'd received from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, which claimed that White's URL "craigslistblog.org" was "infringing" and that its name was "needlessly confusing to members of the media and the general public, and must be changed." Buckmaster did not demand that White stop blogging, but he did request that he stop using the domain, turn it over to Craigslist, and additionally stop posting excerpts from Craigslist on the unofficial blog.
In response, White agreed to stop excerpting Craigslist content, and the unofficial Craigslist Blog now prominently displays the phrase "(the unofficial one)" in its masthead. But White wouldn't back down on the domain.
"I think you have received bad legal counsel and that this is potentially a really bad PR move for (Craigslist)," his e-mail response to Buckmaster said, an allusion to the company's friendly, hippie image.
Buckmaster seemed none too pleased with White's response, and in a second e-mail that White posted to his blog, he reminded the blogger that Craigslist's law firm of choice, Perkins Cole, "also does intellectual property work for Google, and for a lot of other prominent companies."
When White launched the Craigslist Blog last month, Craigslist did not have its own blog. That's changed recently, as Buckmaster now authors an official Craigslist blog. A report earlier this week estimated that Craigslist's annual revenue is likely around $80 million and could be significantly higher, except that the company is "not about the money."
Remember ListPic, the service that used to scrape Craigslist for photos in listings and present them in a wonderfully simple visual browser? Well it's still around, albeit with listings from Oodle instead of Craigslist proper. If you're still jonesing for that visual Craigslist experience, there's a Firefox extension aptly named Craigslist image preview that you're going to enjoy. It will automatically pull up photo thumbnails from each posting and put them into the search results so you can eyeball each item before spending the extra click to see the photos.
This works for everything, not just real estate or items for sale, which actually makes exploring some of Craigslist's darkest depths quite a bit of fun. As Simon over at DownloadSquad notes, a similar tool like this is actually a part of Craigslist already, but only for the bikes listings. We've been expecting Craigslist to roll out its own enhanced visual viewer since the cryptic comment by creator Craig Newark about a visual viewer during the ListPic takedown last June. Until then you'll have to settle for this.
[Via DownloadSquad]
Instead of just links, the image viewer extension automatically adds tiny thumbnails to search results, making it more visually engaging.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Jowba is a new and pretty svelte looking job classifieds service. It's been designed specifically to help people find and post jobs for many of the companies we blog about here on Webware. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I'm a sucker for well designed Web sites, and Jowba is no exception--it's got both form and function going for it.
What makes the service particularly useful compared with Web sites such as Craigslist or Monster is that information about each company is a mandatory aspect of posting, making it a partial directory for all things Web 2.0. It's also completely free to post and apply to jobs, and any job that's been posted will respawn each month instead of expiring if no one ends up biting.
To help aid in the employment hunt, prospective job seekers have a variety of tools at their disposal, including built in maps of where each company is, along with a specially crafted search tool that separates jobs by various Web disciplines. Job posters have a little more power with a special in-box for resumes and tools to post and keep track of positions in a company that has multiple branches. They can also customize each job listing with a special area on the sidebar for leaving personal notes about the position.
There are only a handful of jobs on Jowba at the moment, but I'm assuming that will change as the company gets more aggressive about getting its name out there.
See also: Personforce, VentureLoop, and JobCoin (review).
[via TheNextWeb]
Even Justin.tv is hiring, and now you can see using Jowba, a new job classifieds service for start-ups.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Oodle helps you grok your market.
The classifieds aggregator site Oodle has just launched its 2.0 version. While the underlying functionality hasn't changed, the site got a good design refresh and now presents more relevant data to the user. And, of course, its database of crawled sites continues to grow, making the results more relevant.
As before, Oodle does some semantic analysis of your search query when you go looking for an item. If you type in "Toyota Sienna," Oodle knows it's a car, and on the results page lets you narrow your selection down by model year, color, mileage, and so on. The site also now displays useful data, including charts showing pricing trends (see also MPire, which does this for new items) and the number of new listings that match your search that it expects will pop up in the upcoming week. That bit of information can help you decide how aggressive you need to be about jumping on a listing you like. Oodle also tells you how much the listed price for an item is above or below the average for the product, and it seems to be smart about things like model years, which makes it highly useful.
You can also set up e-mail alerts, so you're notified when new listings matching your query appear. This is great if you want to watch the market for an item before you get serious about buying.
Oodle claims that improved spam detection in 2.0 will also reduce the number of bogus entries you have to deal with in your search.
Oodle 2.0 really is an improvement. The site is now smarter and more useful than before. However, Oodle still doesn't index Craigslist, which is a crying shame and a topic for a good rant (against Craigslist), but it does search eBay and Kijiji, the classifieds site eBay's acquired in 2005.
Lately I've been really impressed by some of eBay's latest Web gizmos, including their auction-sharing widget that's got both a standalone embed, and even their less-than-stellar Facebook app. There's also their Adobe AIR application that's both beautiful and useful at the same time. The one thing that I think needed some work was their search tool, which the folks at GetItNext seem to agree with. Their eBay search tool helps sort through results before you even see them. In essence, it's trying to overcome the inherent clutter that's come of eBay since the service became immensely popular.
If you had used eBay in its early days, the search experience was completely different, and searching for a cell phone would often actually give you handsets as the top results instead of faceplates, phone chargers, stick-on crystals, etc.
With GetItNext when you search for something on eBay, you might actually find what you're looking for instead of a mess of crazy auctions.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The best way to really see the difference between the two search tools is stacking them up against each other with a smattering of identical queries. All in all, I was pretty impressed with GetItNext, as it managed to come up with fairly similar results, but often the GetItNext results had less junk. Even better, GetItNext will include the shipping price in each result to help you avoid some of those great deals that have a less than great, or ridiculously high shipping price.
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