Wednesday, January 30, 2008
eBay Changes Fee Structure To Drive Growth
eBay yesterday announced a major shake up in its fee structure in an attempt to revitalize their core auction business.
Amazon surpassed eBay in US traffic in December for the first time according to Nielsen, and growth rates on eBay have been either static or minimal over the last two to three years.Under the changes, eBay will slash listing fees by up to 50%, but in turn will increase its commission on items that do sell. Extras such as including photos with listing will now be offered for free. eBay will also increase fees on specific items, including goods sold for less that $25 to 8.75%, a 67% increase according to AP.
An example of the new price structure:Another AP report suggests that eBay sellers are not happy about the changes, with one eBay user saying that “It looks like what they are trying to do with the fees is make it more difficult and expensive to sell low-end items. The people that are selling low-end items are going to feel this fee increase the most.”selling a purse at auction for $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for listing the item plus eBay’s commission of $1.31. Under the new structure, the seller would pay $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.
comScore stats show that eBay still retains a lead of Amazon (graph right) but the gap is closing. Amazon has continued to build a non-auction based alternative to eBay, complete with independent sellers and a used items marketplace that has seen solid growth at Amazon at a rate eBay simply hasn’t matched. With new leadership at eBay after the announcement of long term CEO Meg Whitman’s retirement this announcement will likely be the first of more to come as eBay looks to find growth from what is still one of the leading Ecommerce providers on the planet.
Yahoo’s OpenID Service Launches Public Beta
I tried it out on Plaxo, and it’s definitely an improvement over previous integrations of OpenID. Versus needing to enter a URL such as username.myopenid.com before providing your username and password, you simply follow a “sign in with Yahoo ID” link, where you can enter your Yahoo credentials. Several pages of education on how exactly your Yahoo ID can be used to sign into other web sites follows, and from there you simply sign up for Plaxo and can then use your Yahoo credentials to sign in on future visits.
Kudos to Yahoo for getting this out quickly. Now we’ll see if they take the next step and start allowing users to sign into various Yahoo services with the OpenID provider of their choice.
Blogged with Flock
The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini
Last October, Mozilla announced that they were working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser. As it turns out, they were working on two versions: one designed for touchscreen devices like the iPhone and another for traditional phones. Now Mozilla has finally given us a glimpse of their designs by posting the plans, mockups, and details of these two upcoming mobile browsers on the Mozilla wiki.
Non-Touchscreen Firefox Mobile
The non-touchscreen browser introduces a virtual cursor that is controlled with the keyboard navigational keys. Using short presses (clicks) on the directional pad's left key will quickly navigate through clickable elements. Longer presses on the left key will begin smooth scrolling. When scrolling, after a set amount of time the page will gradually zoom out to give you a view of the entire layout which will allow for faster scrolling. When you stop pressing the directional pad button, the browser will gradually zoom back in on the element that the cursor is positioned over.
The right key of the directional pad will bring up a menu that provides access to navigation functionality, including items like the Address Bar, Refresh, Back, History, Bookmarks, Tabs, Bookmark This, and Quit.
Touchscreen Firefox Mobile
The touchscreen version of the Firefox mobile browser seems to borrow from Apple's mobile Safari browser with some familiar-looking buttons which include the back and forward navigation arrows, a bookmarks button, and a retractable address bar. The star-bookmarks button will show you a list of your bookmarks if you tap it once; tap it twice and you can bookmark the current page you are viewing.
However, this UI also includes some new features like Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons, which are on the bottom toolbar, as well as a tabs button that will display up to four tab previews displayed 2x2 on your screen for fast tab switching.
Weave Integration to Come?
Although not detailed in these specifications, many sites are speculating that these new mobile browsers will provide bookmark syncing through Weave, Mozilla's new project for data and metadata portability. This is likely since mobile syncing was one of the listed "Use Cases" in the Mozilla Labs forum on the project. With Weave, though, bookmark syncing could really be just the beginning. Weave could, in theory, also sync up browser settings like sessions and passwords from desktop to mobile to laptop and beyond.
Another big possibility is the development of extensions designed just for Mobile Firefox. This would be a break-out feature that could make Mobile Firefox unique in this space. However, no plans for this type of development have been announced yet.
The Mobile Firefox browser should arrive sometime in late 2008.
...But Opera Mini Already Does That
What's interesting about the Mobile Firefox announcement and surrounding hubbub is that Opera Mini today offers nearly the same features that Mozilla is still developing.
Most notably, Opera Mini 4 can already sync your mobile phone bookmarks with the bookmarks on your computer by using something called Opera Link. Although not as seamless as the possible Weave setup (perhaps), syncing bookmarks with Opera is fairly simple.
You click "Synchronize Opera" on the Start Page and then sign in with your Opera Account. Opera Mini will continue to synchronize your data until you log out.
Opera Link Photo via Opera.com
A virtual mouse is also provided: you can move the cursor towards what you want and it quickly snaps the view to the link or the content. When you first visit a web page, Opera Mini shows you an overview and suggest where to begin reading. Click once and you can zoom in on the content.
Opera Mini also has several keyboard shortcuts. Power scrolling shortcuts (2, 4, 6, and 8 keys) let you quickly move around the web page and the 5 key zooms you in and out. Pressing 1 bring up the Context Menu where you can hit reload or switch to Mobile View. This unique Small Screen Rendering feature lets you fit any web page to your screen's width. Opera Mini 4 will adjust the page structure on the fly, so you can browse up and down without having to also deal with horizontal scrolling.
Blackberry users have built-in menus designed just for them and for Windows Mobile/Symbian users, there's an even more feature-rich Opera Mobile browser to use.Why Firefox Might Win
Although Opera Mini is a great mobile browser with tons of features, back on the desktop, Firefox has more users. So, when it comes time to choose a mobile browser, the one that syncs with your desktop browser of choice is likely to win out. Plus, if add-ons are developed for Mobile Firefox, it has the possibility of becoming a killer mobile app.Vicito News: Personalized News Aggregation Via IM
Vicito News is a new personalized news aggregation service that operates over instant messenger using an IM robot. The service currently works with AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. Vicito is something akin to Google News alerts for IM -- you tell the service what to watch for, and it updates you at preset intervals via instant messenger when it finds new news matching your query.
Vicito would fall under the single stream aggregation category of news aggregators, in that it combines news from multiple sources about a specific topic into a single stream. You set up Vicito entirely through IM by telling the bot what keywords you want to track, how many stories you want maximum per update, and how frequently you want updates.
I told Vicito to track stories related to "baseball" and this afternoon I compared the results to those from SportsSpyder's MLB page. Not surprisingly, they were both dominated by news about the trade of Johan Santana -- baseball's top pitcher -- to the New York Mets. Somewhat surprisingly, though, I actually found Vicito's news to be more varied. Beyond Satana I was getting stories about Roger Clemens visits the Astros training camp, pitcher Andy Pettitte, and Major Leaue Baseball's umpire background check policy that were nowhere to be found amid the Santana noise (or were buried) on SportsSpyder.
Tracking "yankees" news on Vicito.
A lot of that might have to do with the source list. Vocito right now is drawing from 750 large and mainstream news sources that cover the gamut in terms of topic. SportsSpyder, on the other hand, is drawing from specialized sources that deal exclusively with baseball -- so certainly the overlap and number of reporters covering the same big story will be greater.
But the experience does highlight one major problem with single stream aggregators like these: there is a lot repetition. Because Vicito is just posting a river of news that matches your search query, you end up getting the same story from multiple source. Unlike with meme-style aggregators like Google News or Techmeme (or perhaps, more on topic, Ballbug), which group similar stories, Vicito's stream loses some appeal once you've seen the same story 5 times.
Even with the noise problem, though, Vicito remains a useful service for getting breaking, topically filtered, news updates over IM. If instant messenger is your preferred method of communication, then you might find some utility in Vicito. Vicito is free to use, with a premium for-pay package that ups the limit on the number of news stories you can receive per update and how often.
MySpace opens doors to developers
MySpace will open its doors to software developers allowing them to create games and media-sharing applications for the popular social network. 
MySpace will formally launch its "Developer Platform" next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up.
The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook.
Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year.
It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site.
These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble.
However, despite its popularity, Facebook still lags behind MySpace in terms of overall users.
MySpace has around 200 million registered users, compared to 63 million who use Facebook.
MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m in 2005.
Last October it announced that it would join OpenSocial, Google's platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.
Other networks such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use the tools.
The tools, available from 5 February, will allow developers to build applications that make use of MySpace member profile information and their connections with other users.
According to the new CTO of MySpace, Amit Kapur, developers will also be able to make money out of their applications.
"I will be focused on making a platform for developers to monetize and promote their applications," he told Reuters.Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Google’s Departed Godfather of AdSense Joins the Tumri Project
After Gokul Rajaram, the “Godfather of AdSense,” left Google at a seemingly inopportune time for the search company, no plans were indicated on Rajaram’s part as to what direction his new solo career would head. Today, however, we’ve learned that Rajaram is indeed sticking with his expertise in consumer and business ads, and has joined the board of directors at Tumri, a one-to-one online display marketing solution. Tumri works as a consolidated, one-stop-shop for brands to create their online campaigns to be delivered across platforms, media types, etc. It is one of several companies looking to provide a centralized service that does some of the heavy lifting for the brands that bcome their clients, extending certain projections and other data to form a targeted display ad campaign that will reach end users and consumers. Tumri has in fact spend quite some time building up its staff of notable veterans in the field, including Calvin Lui. From the looks of it, Rajaram is attracted to Tumri because of its technology, which is central to its service as a differentiating factor. Dubbed the AdPod, Tumri constructs a brand’s online ad campaign as a platform, combining existing creatives and marketing messages with offers and listings, turning it into a dynamic ad widget. Rajaram’s presence on Tumri’s board of directors helps solidify not only Tumri as a company, but dynamic ad widgets as an effective and scalable form of targeting advertisements. The way I see it, widgets incorporate reporting and an ability to change, which are primary reasons for why they are being experimented with so heavily at this time.Digg Joins DataPortability, Will Support OpenID
In a blog post this morning, the company writes:
Additionally, the post indicates that the company will soon support OpenID, though it’s unclear if that means you’ll be able to login to Digg using OpenID, or if they’ll simply join a long list of companies including Yahoo and AOL that are allowing you to use your credentials from their respective services to login on other sites.“Want to sync your Digg friends network with another service? We want to help you do that. Want to use your Digg activity to get recommendations from another web site? We’re working on that, too.”
All of this sounds good to me. As we now know, most of the main players are already in on DataPortability, including Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Mashable readers were fairly split in a recent poll where we asked whether DataPortability was all hype or the next big thing:
Welcome, Digg. Now let’s see what happens.
The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme
It had to happen sooner or later. We’ve had Technorati. We’ve had TechMeme. Now we have Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. The business of tracking the online conversation just a got shot in the arm a big hit with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.
Built by the makers Fav.or.it, a yet-to-launch blog commenting system, and based on an idea by Marjolein Hoekstra, Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others.
But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme. [For an explanation of how Fav.or.it will work see here and here].
The knockout punch is that Tweetmeme will Twitter the original person who first mentioned the item if it makes it onto Tweetmeme. This is going to be fun…Monday, January 28, 2008
SmugMug’s Private Photos Aren’t Really Private
Photo hosting site SmugMug apparently has a huge security hole which allows anyone to easily access other users’ photos which have been marked as “private,” reports Google Blogoscoped. What’s worse, the folks at SmugMug are aware of the issue, but claim this is intended behavior, separating the notions of “privacy” and “security.”
In a nutshell, the problem is this: if you set your photos as “private”, they can still be accessed simply by URL manipulation; for example, I randomly typed in this URL “http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1021″ in my browser and got someone’s gallery that, perhaps, was not intended for the whole world to see. It is possible to prevent this behavior by setting a special password for your image/gallery, but how many people understand this?
Here’s an excerpt from SmugMug’s CEO Don MacAskill’s long conversation with Google Blogoscoped:
“…we view security and privacy as two separate, but related, issues. Security is like locking your front door (no-one can get in with out a key) and privacy is like closing your window drapes (no-one can look in from the outside, but you can tell people where you live and they can visit without a key).
At SmugMug, the feature you’re talking about, private galleries, falls under the privacy umbrella, not security. It’s intentionally designed so that you can “tell other people” about your photos (share a URL in an email, embed or hyperlink on your blog or message forum, etc) without having to share something like a password. Only people you’ve shared this URL with can find the gallery and/or photos in question.
The problem here, of course, is the fact that most people don’t care about semantics in cases such as this; if they set a photo to “private,” most of them probably expect that no one else can see this photo, period. A similar discussion arose recently when it was discovered that Google Reader shares your “shared” items with everyone in your Gmail account, but this is a far worse problem, because private photos are at stake. As usual, it will probably just take some media attention (such as this article) for the folks at SmugMug to get to their senses, but why does it always have to be so?
