EBay Joins The Social Network Bandwagon With “Neighborhoods”
EBay has decided to take a stab at social networking. The online auction site has taken the wraps off a new feature it calls “eBay Neighborhoods,” which are groups through which you can connect with others who share like interests in products.
EBay Neighborhoods allow you to write and share product reviews, make comments and add photos. The basic idea is to create a social environment that strives to make EBay seem less like a scammers paradise and more like your neighborhood shopping mall.
While the new neighborhoods section offers some nice flashy widgets and all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a social networking feature — tag clouds, photos, recommendations and more — the basic content is wanting.
In essence the new features are a more colorful implementation of Ebay’s somewhat archaic message boards, which have long served as a way for users to swap advice and suggestions, though glancing through the boards, it would seem that the most popular topics are from users complaining about the services eBay is missing.
EBay seems to slightly misunderstand social networks though, the new neighborhoods are not user created, rather you can choose from some 600 pre-created options. Why not open up the process to everyone? After all publicly created groups have been quite successful for Flickr and other social networks. In the EBay version you can “suggest” but not create a new neighborhood.
The new EBay Neighborhoods offer a watered down version of services that sites like Yelp have pioneered. In fact, as Techdirt points out, EBay seems to have even “borrowed” an actual graphic straight from Yelp. Since Yelp offers a boatload of features above and beyond those in EBay’s new neighborhoods, there’s really no compelling reason to turn to EBay for product advice.
Still, die-hard EBay users may find the new features useful and hopefully EBay will expand the functionality in the near future.
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