The AuctionBytes Blog received special recognition by being included in the new Wiley book "Blogging Heroes," featuring interviews with 30 bloggers. The author of Blogging Heroes is the incomparable Michael A. Banks who frequently contributes to AuctionBytes newsletters - as well as one of the articles in this issue. Michael has been writing about technology since the 1980s and wrote some of the first books about the Internet, so who better to tackle the topic of blogging!
Wiley and Michael are letting each featured blogger post his chapter on his own blog. You can download the PDF file to the AuctionBytes chapter on the AuctionBytes Blog, right under the book cover in the margin (http://blog.auctionbytes.com).
People have become enamored of Facebook.com since it opened its platform to third-party developers. Companies and individuals have made a mad dash to create applications for this social networking site, including ecommerce apps from eBay and Buy.com. I read recently that someone said "Facebook is like the Internet - in fact, it is the Internet." I like Facebook, but it reminds me an awful lot of AOL back in the 1990s in its walled garden approach.
Don McLagan wrote an interesting piece about the relationship between Facebook and developers. He quotes Mitch Kapor warning developers that "platform owners have the power," "some platform owners want to control the whole system," and "platform owners need their applications, but they are destined to absorb the best of them into the platform." (http://blog.compete.com/2007/10/09/facebook-applications-community-next-conference).
But leave it to Google to challenge any exclusivity Facebook might build. As Google pointed out on its blog, there aren't just one or two social networks, but ten or fifteen. "To get on all the social networks, a developer has had to customize their application for each one." So Google introduced last week "OpenSocial," a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere that supports the OpenSocial APIs (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/opensocial-makes-web-better.html).
Kapor's thoughts on platform owners apply to eBay too. Which got me thinking - imagine if eBay and Amazon did not keep their members' feedback exclusive to their respective marketplaces. If feedback ratings were portable, members would feel more comfortable trading with each other on other marketplaces.
It's possible eBay has pondered the idea of portable feedback but couldn't come up with a revenue model to justify the possible erosion of market-share such a move might make.
And speaking of eBay-plus-social networking, I haven't heard anyone who's impressed with its recent attempts at social networking features. The irony is that eBay is probably correct when it calls itself one of the Web's first social networks. While I sometimes scoff at corporations' use of the word community, eBay users truly have built social networks from the earliest days. I think eBay should stop trying to keep up with the Jones' (and the Googles and the Facebooks), and just make its site safe and reliable. Everything else would take care of itself.
Before I sign off, I want to send a special message to my mom whose birthday is coming up. David and I are lucky to have families that support us in all our ventures, and my mom has been a special guiding light throughout my life. Thank you mom - and dad - and to all the moms and dads reading this who've encouraged their children along the way.
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Thanks for reading.
About the author:
Ina Steiner is Editor of AuctionBytes.com and author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). She has a background in marketing and research in the high-tech and publishing fields. If you have story ideas, comments or questions, send them to ina@auctionbytes.com.
