I posted a few months ago saying that while TradeMe is undoubtedly a super success story, it isn’t a fantastic example of web 2.0 (not that it needs to be given that it has around 75% of NZ’s total net traffic as it is!). I said at the time that product interest groups, micro communities and more rating and information functionality would pull it over the 2.0 line.

Well blow me down but I see that Ebay has just introduced a beta test of the Best of Ebay.

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BoE allows members to rate auctions and thus to form a democratically measured auction popularity rank. It’s a great start but only goes some of the way – imagine if I could go to best_of_ebay/tea_cosy_world and there look at and rate all the tea cosies on offer. Imagine if while I was there I could get some Wikipedia style information about all that is relevant to the world of tea cosies. Imagine if within the tea_cosy_world micro site I could discuss tea cosies with all the other tea cosy nutters out there.

Now that would be fully web 2.0!

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • Ebay is now catching up to Amazon. The main reason for ranking and rating is solely for item recommendation (exactly as Amazon has been doing for years). The data is needed to be collected so that Ebay (when enough data is gathered) could recommend items to online customers. This is what catapulted Amazon to being the top in the world in online retailing because of automated product recommendation, based on ranking and shoppers past transactions. So, I am pretty much sure that they will start doing item recommendation at some stage. Automated recommendation has been well established that it increases sales.

    PS: I don’t see Trade Me doing recommendation? I’ve only used it once (2 years ago), so I am not aware if they do or not. I could certainly give them a hint of how to do automated online recommendation (algorithmicwise).

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