Not bad. eBay’s new site let’s you combine with the masses to vote on popular auctions – and thus drive more traffic to those auctions and eBay in general.
It seems good on first appearance – there is the obligatory eye-candy – in this case the classic Web 2.0 rounded corners and Digg-like voting buttons with strange creatures attached:
The site feels cool – with a great, if greenish, look. (can you feel the however coming?)
However. Firstly if you want to vote you need to login, and after you login you are confronted with this:
It’s asking whether it is OK if I share my information with “another company”. But sadly and strangely there is absolutely no indication of what or whom that other company actually is. Perhaps it is just another eBay legal entity, or maybe this is a stealthy way for my eBay purchasing and browsing information to be passed to dodgy marketing companies. I declined the opportunity.
The other issue with the site, for those less paranoid than me, is that Auctions are ethereal, lasting only 7 days (usually). While rumour sites like Truemors can cope with that (they uses editors), other sites like Digg take time to identify hot items and them promote them to the masses. A new Auction listing may take 3 or 4 days to be discovered, and by then it is essentially too late as it is gone. It also remains to be seen whether old auctions will be visible – that would change the paradigm a bit.
So I am not holding my breath on this one. But nice eye candy nonetheless.
Lance Wiggs 
Comments are closed.