eBay Opens Social Networks - For Like-Minded eBayers

eBay’s blog describes Neighborhoods as “ideal micro-communities: groups of people centered around a shared passion for particular products or activities.” Neighborhoods feature discussion boards, snapshot views of related products, related reviews, guides, and blog posts. Neighborhood members can vote on pictures submitted by other members. Apparently, Neighborhoods are somewhat flexible; “the Harrison Ford neighborhood might show listings for Star Wars or Indiana Jones,” eBay explained.

I started looking for Neighborhoods, but couldn’t find them. What I did find, however, was a substantial amount of community activity. The site already features a ton of different discussion boards. Neighborhoods are supposed to offer more, but apparently haven’t launched yet. Nathan Sacco, one of the people responsible for the user experience at eBay, noted that they would be focused around the interests that people have listed in their My World profiles.

This showed me how long I’d been away from eBay, as I didn't have any idea what a My World profile was. But no, when I went to the help pages to find out, I discovered it was similar to things I’ve seen before. (I was thinking of About Me pages, but apparently those are different from My World pages). But eBay had expanded what could be put on it from what I remembered. Users could add content to tell the community about themselves using some pre-set modules, including ones for favorites, a bio, a blog, a guest book, and reviews and guides.

One thing that is nice is that you can now use My World to find users with similar interests. You can either put the interest into the appropriate search engine when you’re at My World, or you can use the tag cloud. Let me show you the screen shot for myworld.ebay.com so you can see what I mean:

You can see the tag cloud on the right. Oh by they way, all of those images in the center? They aren’t just for show; they’re user avatars. Every time you hover over one, it enlarges and shows the user’s handle. Clicking on the image takes you to that user’s My World page. In short, eBay is trying to reinvent itself, at least in part, as a social site.

Next: eBay, We Hardly Knew You >>
 

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