Comments on: But before I drift off to sleep…

By: Pierre

Pierre — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 20:26:05 +0000

…and what about impulse buying, where I don’t know that I want something until I happened to be somewhere where stuff is sold and see a good deal. Because eBay is a destination, I know that when I go there, there’ll be stuff that I might or might not be interested in. This as opposed to simple “request stuff I need” model, which is questionnable how many people purely ascribe to. Most do both type of buying.

By: anon

anon — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 21:37:48 +0000

Brian misses a fundamental benefit of eBay — ability to trade across geographies and across the world. What happens when you cannot inspect the item? eBay’s right — trust, safety and the feedback system are still required in a global marketplace. And I think eBay delivers such availability notices to customers today…

By: anon

anon — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 01:42:14 +0000

Right, but isn’t it relatively easy to spam those listings? People may not do that now, and you may have a healthy set of listings, but what it is in the end is a kind of (gasp!) semantic web. That’s useful and leads into a discussion of why not have a semantic web. Search engines could create one by virtue of their market power, but perhaps they don’t because of the spam problem.

By: Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 20:31:52 +0000

It's easy for Feedster to support these two commenters. We're a new sort of intermediary that uses [lightweight] semantics to aggregate very precise and timely offers for jobs, couches, etc. jobs.feedster.com is the first of many examples in which we'll do just that.

On the precision side, if you want a software-related job in the eBay ecology and don't really care where, try this. We're only getting few so far when the search is this precise, but it's growing quick.

On the other hand, if you take a look at a broader slice, like all accounting jobs in Seattle, the posting volume is already healthy.

By: David Orban

David Orban — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 09:13:49 +0000

How trust relationships can evolve, and move beyond the closed systems is also well analysed in an article on Ftrain.com, which brings the Semantic Web into the picture.

By: anon

anon — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 05:11:16 +0000

The issue is spam/trust in most open systems. You cannot have the proposed system be viable (on a large scale anyway) without an intermediary that manages the spam/trust issues through reputation, for example. If you built such an open system, then someone would pounce on the opportunity to act as a filter to solve trust issues, and then that intermediary would have incentives and opportunity to extract the same rents that eBay does now.