14 March 2006

eBay backs up community values with cash

Community website www.meetup.com hit the headlines in Businessweek.com recently when eBay, along with other investors, bought up a 10% stake in the company (www.businessweek.com / technology / content / mar2006 / tc20060309_072549.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_more+of+today's+top+stories).

Always a part of the eBay ethos, community sharing has been the focus of the more exciting and successful websites in the news over the last year - del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us / ) and Digg (www.digg.com) being the most obvious - and now eBay has explicitly shown its interest in developing it's wildly successful online auction store into that arena.

The move is made particularly interesting given that Google has recently begun to roll out a new 'seller reputation' aspect to Google Base, which is seen to be direct competition to the current eBay/PayPal dominance in the online reselling sector.

Were eBay to develop the community aspect of its current service then it could be seen as a potential paradigm shift from online selling to community hosting - getting more people onto the eBay site as community users could enable more transactions to be made.

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