Facebook Launches Classifieds Marketplace, What Happened to Oodle?
Monday, May 14th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |
Just days after Facebook announced a partnership with online classifieds aggregator, Oodle, the social networking site has rolled-out a seemingly different classified solution.
Facebook’s new “Marketplace” takes a lot of cues from popular classifieds site, Craigslist, and CNET took it for a test drive.
When you post a listing, you first have to select whether you’re listing something or listing that you want something. Then, within that, you can select a category (items for sale, housing, jobs, everything else) and a sub-category within that category. In the “For Sale” category, for example, it’s divided into college-student-friendly sub-categories of books, tickets, electronics, furniture, and everything else. You can add multiple photos, too.
Image via CNET
What’s weird is there is no category for dating, neither is there one for giving away free stuff. I thought both would be high-up the priority list for the students that make up the bulk of Facebook users.
So, what’s up with Oodle? Did Facebook change their mind? Are the two services different? I know the Oodle team read this blog, so perhaps they’ll comment. In the meantime, anyone care to speculate what’s going on?
UPDATE: We’ve received this statement from Matt Hicks of Facebook…
Facebook Marketplace and the classifieds offered from partners such as Oodle are separate but complementary offerings. Marketplace offers general listings integrated throughout Facebook, so users can view the listings within the context of their friends and networks. Our partners offer sponsored groups that take users to other online classifieds outside of Facebook and provide additional resources around topics, like careers.
And Oodle’s Craig Donato left us this comment
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May 14th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
We built a cool group in Facebook that lets users post and share listings with other Facebook users. One of the key differences (relative to what Facebook just launched) is that Oodle lets users search and explore thousands of other local listings. This is especially important when you’re looking for a part-time job, new apartment, etc where listings posted by other Facebook users may not be enough to find what you’re looking for.
The Facebook API is pretty interesting… We continue to see new ways to leverage it to do more interesting things as it relates to “social classifieds” on Facebook.
May 14th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Thanks for the clarification Craig!