SOMEWHAT FRANK

iList: A Social Classified Ad Marketplace

iList is aiming to be like the popular online classified site craigslist but with a social twist. It offers users the ability to post an item on iList that look better than your typical craigslist listing but that is not all. iList's strength lies in the ability to easily share that listing with a number of social sites like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. This distribution strategy is one that craigslist currently does not employ as it acts as a destination waiting for people to sift through and find items. iList's distribution approach could help it to grow virally though existing social communication channels.

eBay Seller Boycott Could Give Startups A Shot

A movement that started as a thread in the eBay forums has turned into an all out eBay Seller Boycott from February 18 - 25. The sellers on eBay have united and are staging to lash out against eBay for recent seller fee raises and feedback changes. A similar eBay boycott was successful for sellers in 2005 so it appears they are looking for a repeat success. They have even created a YouTube video for the eBay boycott.

I am not a big eBay buyer or seller but I think this little boycott could give other startups in the space an opportunity. If you are looking to sell handmade goods you might give Esty a try. If you are looking to just get rid of something in your local area you could leverage craigslist or Kijiji. There are lots of other options as well, so if you have a startup that is an alternative to eBay share it with SOMEWHAT FRANK by dropping a comment with the information.

ParkingHunter Helps You Find Monthly Parking

Finding a place to park your sweet ride everyday near your home or work can sometimes be tough, especially in larger cities where there is less real estate in the first place. Most condos and homes have parking included but some do not and that is when your hunt for parking begins. ParkingHunter, a Toronto-based startup, looks to help by aggregating available parking spot listings into one search-able place. The goal is to connect car-less home owners that have empty driveways, with motorists who want affordable parking.

EveryBlock: A Hyper-Local News Aggegator

Map mashups have become almost a dime a dozen these days as the release of open APIs by just about every major online mapping site and and development tools has lowered the barriers of entry. That was not always the case though and as recently as 2005 trailblazing mashup like HousingMaps.com (a cross between Google Maps and Craigslist housing listings) and ChicagoCrime.org (used Google Maps and Chicago Crime data to display crimes on a map) developers actually had to reverse engineer JavaScript code to create  mashup. This all changed with the release of Google Maps API and most of the major mapping sites on the Web have since followed suit.

It was recently announced that due to some server issues and overlaps with another new mashup the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism award winning early mashup ChicagoCrime.org will be redirect to - EveryBlock. EveryBlock, launched recently, is also mashup of sorts created by Chicago-based Adrian Holovaty the developer that produced ChicagoCrime.org. EveryBlock is a news aggregator site for Chicago, New York and San Francisco that looks to help you answer the question:

“What’s happening in my neighborhood?”

The site compiles all the openly available public records and then slices and dices them so that they are easily accessible by zip code, address or neighborhood.

Car Buying: Online To The Drive Home

After driving a used Toyota Avalon for the last few years, I finally figured out what vehicle I wanted  to buy and made the move on Sunday at Infiniti of Tyson's Corner. I am now a proud owner of an Infiniti FX35 (shown below). This article will summarize some of the online resources I used to purchase my new vehicle.

MetroProper: Give Props To Local Scene

MetroProper, a Chicago-based startup founded by Philip Tadros, will soon be launching into the public beta, after an extended private beta period which started in July 2006. MetroProper is a social network for business or personal profiles with citizen journalism in cities around the world.

SF Power Outage Takes Down Web

In case you missed it, San Francisco had a power outage today that was caused by an explosion downtown. The fire from the explosion knocked out electricity and several big siteswhich included Netflix, Craigslist, Typepad, Vox and LiveJournal - all were down for several hours.

Somewhat Frank is powered by Typepad therefore was also down as part of the go-juice outage. Sorry for the inconvenience if you were trying to get to the site during the outage.

Power outlet photo by kris krüg.

Facebook Growth, Content Worth 4.3B, Twitter vs. Pownce, Podcasting Tools, Sphere Success & CrunchBase

Photo of the Week: American Flag on Parade at Dewey Beach for the 'Running of the Bulls' taken by Matt Hirschmann.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.08.07

Facebook Sees Flood of New Traffic from Teenagers and Adults
In the months prior to allowing open registration, Facebook.com’s traffic hovered at approximately 14 million visitors per month. However, after Facebook opened its doors to the general public, visitation accelerated to reach a level of 26.6 million visitors.

Your Content is About to Be Worth $4.3B
MediaWeek reports that advertising on social networks, blogs and other venues where consumers produce content is about to become a much bigger business than it is now. It's on pace to be a billion-dollar business this year. However, by 2011 it will grow to $4.3B.

Twitter v Pownce: It’s The API, Stupid
Nik Cubrilovic compares Twitter to Pownce and believes that there are two key things that Twitter has done well that Pownce has overlooked completely.

CrunchBase
TechCrunch quietly rolls out a web 2.0 directory of companies and services.

MyBlogLog: DNS for People
Ian Kennedy explains MyBlogLog's strategy. They want to build a platform which allows you to get to know someone through what they produce and share, collectively, across all networks and the internet.

Podcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources
A great list of podcasting resources aggregated by Mashable.

'Hyper-Local' Site Backfence Shutting Down
Backfence emerged about the same time, a couple of years ago, as InsiderPages, Judy's Book and Yelp. Now it appears to be closing its doors.

Classified Info: Craigslist Alternatives Compared
The online classified sites compared.

Sphere Quietly Nailing Its Business Model
Instead of focusing on building a better blog search engine (an area that Google now dominates after a recent Technorati refocus), Sphere has spent its time developing technology that automatically finds blog posts related to whatever a user is looking at

Netvibes, now with one less CEO
GigaOm reports on some changes at Netvibes which includes the departure of Pierre Chappaz. Chappaz is leaving Netvibes and instead will be focusing on Wikio, his personalized blog and news search service that is now said to have two million unique visitors a month.

Ztail Simplifying Selling Stuff Online

Have you ever looked around your place and noticed you tend to save things, lots of things, that you no longer need, want or care about? If so, you might want to sell something on Ztail, an eBay compatible Alpha application. Through a partnership with Compete.com, Ztail surveyed 2,500 registered eBay users about what stopped them from selling online. Eighty-five percent (or 2125 people surveyed) said online selling was too hard and time consuming.

Ztail is focused on simplifying selling by searching product and transaction data for millions of items and automating the listing process, creating the basis for the simple, intuitive and effective Click Once, Sell Everywhere model. Ztail aimed to bypass a complicated and lengthy process, and simplified it into three easy steps:

Find your product, Publish your listing, Share your listing.

Once the listing is created, Ztail plugs the user into his or her own social media and instantly distributes the listing to selected friends via blogs, email and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Finally, Ztail offers tools to help users track and adjust activity in their personal MyZtail pages. 

Bill Hudak and Dave Keefer founded Ztail in 2006, with a combined 20 years in online experience at companies like Google, Netscape, ePinions and Shopping.com. Bill and Dave have watched online commerce develop from its infancy and created Ztail to make selling online quick and easy for everyone.

I set up an account, followed the directions and personalized my ad within a few minutes on eBay, edgeio, Google Base, oodle and vast. GigaOm offers additional perspective on Ztail as well.

Searching For A Pony Online

Since I flew out to Chicago to co-host TECH cocktail 2 on Thursday night, I made a weekend out of it and visited family and friends in the area. On Saturday, I made a trip out to the country and visited some of my relative’s latest arrivals, which happen to be two pregnant quarter horses named Lucy and Belle (shown to the right). I inquisitively wondered where you might purchase horses of this kind. Is there an online classified advertising site devoted to horses for sale? In doing some quick searching online I learned of the following options:

• Equine.com is probably the most well established and best option as it appears to offer the most search results. Its advanced search features allow users to really narrow down search results based on very specific criteria.
• Horseville.com uses a craigslist-like plain and simple design to offer a super advanced search functionality which rivals that of Equine.com. Results include photos and sometimes videos, as well an inline family background or bloodline charts since most horse buyers are looking for a certain pedigree.
• 2BuyHorses.com offers very light classified listings however some of the listings have multiple photos.
• Horsecity.com, is a site that is not solely devoted but is a few steps away from being a “social network” for horse related products. They offer a primitive blog which is powered by the open-source project called drupal. Its classified ads offer some interesting advertising features which include the addition of a video clip to an ad which might be useful if you want to see a horse in action. In addition, Horsecity.com offers a pedigree search which could come in handy when searching for a specific breeding bloodline.
• Quarter Horse Directory  or QHD.com offers classified advertising spots that are extremely primitive and resemble table cells with all capitalized ad text without any photos – pretty ugly user experience compared to these other options but I presume it still gets the job done.
• Horsetopia.com offers a number resources and classified listings with up to six photos. In addition horse ranches or breeders can create a profile page which displays all of their current listings.
  

I also turned to craigslist.com to see if I could find any classified advertisements and found none in the Chicago area. Next, I visited Edgeio, the classified listing site which looks along the edge of the web for listings. Edgeio had one page of Illinois listings when I searched for the term “quarter  horse” and most of them came from a site called EverythingEquus.com a site that I did not find via other conventional search methods. I am no equestrian so I wonder if there are other solid options I failed to mention?

Of the current offerings I would have to say Equine.com offers the largest selection and most advanced interface design which sets it apart from the other current horse classified site options. The horse classified business online is extremely segmented which leaves a huge opportunity to create a horse classified listing aggregator site to allow a user to find all of the various sites and listings in one set of search results. Similar to how Zillow.com came out of nowhere to plant itself in the think of a competitive real estate sites, the online horse classified business landscape could change very quickly with the introduction of a solid web 2.0 offering. Classified advertising sites online do not need to be flashy to be successful. However, I must mention I did find that most of the web sites esthetically resemble “old school” web or web 1.0. In addition, none of the above offered RSS or syndication feeds.

Bottom-line: There are number of niche sites devoted to online horse classified advertisements but there is a lot of room for improvement and opportunity for innovation in the space.

Realtors Turning To Blogs & Web Services

Listing my Chicago condo for sale last week coincided with a Classified Intelligence report (sorry no direct link available) which examined the latest marketing and advertising patterns of real estate agents. The report concluded many interesting trends about Realtors. Most notably the report showed a reduction of print ad spending while increases in online spending. An article by Kate Kaye highlighted the same report and explained that while overall advertising spending by real estate agents is increasing the bulk of the spending is on their own Web sites. Andy Beal believes the online spending is going to the creation of blogs.  

What does this all mean? There is huge opportunity for a company looking to offer tools for real estate agents, buyers and sellers. A prime example of this is the recent explosive rise in popularity of Zillow and its Zestimates which have already almost become a household term. Furthermore, there is a HUGE opportunity for a blog platform for real estate listings. Wait, isn't there a product already doing this? YES, thats right, edgeio!  

Edgeio is an online listing aggregator which enables a user to create a listing online. I highlighted edgeio before here, here, here and here. Keith Teare of Edgeio recently explained:

"Edgeio is an excellent tool for syndicating out listings. Edgeio is an aggregation of listings for real estate and other categories. With the influx real estate agents getting into blogging for the sole purpose of posting listings Edgeio can also act as a blog platform for agents."

Edgeio currently displays over 227,000 real estate listings. Edgeio fits perfectly with the trend of web site development spending being made by Realtors since edgeio can crawl and aggregate listings from regular web sites and blogs at no cost to the Realtors.

Google Base also is positioned perfectly for the online web site trends of Realtors. Sam Sebastian of Google recently conveyed that his team is going out to educate Realtors about Google Base. They are explaining how to get listed on Google Base by just creating and submitting a simple feed of Web site contents to Google Base which places items accessible as results directly via Google search results.

Bottom-line: Real estate hunting is solidifying itself as an "online" activity as Realtors have been spending more  on online ads and their Web sites so there is a huge opportunity for real estate related sites and online services. Ultimately, products like edgeio and Google Base could threaten paid inclusion sites like Move.com and Homescape among others. 

Craigslist Worth $2.4 Billion?

A case study by Startup Review, a blog recently started by Nisan Gabbay of Sierra Ventures, has estimated that Craigslist is worth $2.4 billion. The estimate takes Craigslist's business model into consideration and weighs it along side eBay which could be the perfect company to buy Craigslist - especially since eBay already owns 25 percent. Somehow though, I don't think Craig Newmark is quite ready to sell the rest off to eBay quite yet or he would have already. It does make for interesting conversation though, as companies like YouTube and Facebook swirl in acquisition rumors with price-tags in the billions.

Read/Write Web, pointed me to the report - thanks Richard.

Power to the People Panel at Supernova

I just observed a wonderful strategic discussion pertaining to the ins and outs of community building and consumer generated content at Supernova 2006. I have highlighted some of the points made by the panel which consisted of the following participants:

Craig Newmark (Founder of Craigslist)
Saul Klein (VP of Marketing at Skype)
Tina Sharkey (Senior VP of Network & Community Programming at AOL)
Mena Trott (Co-founder Six Apart)
Gil Penchina (CEO of Wikia)

Tina Sharkley pointed out that AOL has been doing communities for a very long time and based on her experiences she believes that people want to be a part of a smaller community (i.e. a AIM contact list is an example of a smaller community). She also talked about a new product called AIM Phoneline that will give users another way to communication online but this time with voice. Tina went on to say:

“The user is at the center of everything we (AOL) do.”

She went on highlight how with AIM Pages they are looking to open up the API’s for the open web to help build the product.

Gil Penchina explained how Wikia, the sister site to the popular wiki site Wikipedia, is trying to bring people together. They feel the larger and more inspirational the topic the easier it is to do that. Gil believes that people are generally good but that a few very well organized bad people. So Wikia lets anyone contribute and then monitors the wiki to squash the evil doings of the bad ones.

In a similar fashion to Wikia, Craig Newmark said that Craigslist is letting the community form the community. They have created the site and now they get out of the way. Craig mentioned the Katrina disaster situation as a prime example of that as the New Orleans Craigslist site created a life of its own after the Katrina disaster. Craig said they do not to anything to reach anyone relying on word of mouth.

Mena Trott of Six Apart says that she likes to observe but doesn’t always participate in large communities. She says it is the auditorium vs. the living room fee l and prefers the living room. She also explained that using the product is as important as what you are doing when developing the participatory product. Additionally, Mena explained how she is "not personally a big podcast fan" but believes that audio and video are adding a personal touch to blogging.

Saul Klein of Skype explained that Skype is still in the early stages of understanding how voice plays its part on the web. SkypeCasts are a new way for people to engage in conversations online with 100 people or less. He is excited about the fact that Skype has released an API that is available for people to take and help push the development of the product to new heights. Craig Newmark also showed excitement by sharing a fantasy which included having the ability to add a "click to call" feature to classified advertisement on Craigslist but says that in doing so they do not want to distract the user from their sole function for finding what they are looking for. Interestingly, eBay (which owns Skype) just introduced a similar feature last week.

For additional details on the panel check out this post on the Supernova blog.

Craigslist Adds Cities and Tweaks Layout

Craigslist, the popular free classified advertisements web site created by Craig Newmark, has changed portions of its plain and simple layout to add more cities. The changes were highlighted in a weekend piece in the Wall Street Journal which interviewed, Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster, explained how the new layout categorizes USA locations by state and international locations by country. The article is an interesting read and offers old media newspapers some hints on how to be successful in the online space. According to the article, Jim Buckmaster they include:

“…newspapers would be better off being more Craigslist-like: Go Private, eschew Wall Street’s demands for continually “goosing profitability” and give your readers what they want.”

It sounds so simple: Give your users what they want. Shouldn’t that be the goal of any company? However, it is easier said than done with companies that have been experiencing profit increases year after year for a century. In order for a Craigslist-like strategy to really work you need to change and have TOTAL BUYIN for that change from all parties involved with the company (top executives, product development, and shareholders alike).

Topix.net Enters Classified Ad Business

Topix.net, a news aggregator service owned by three large, traditional media companies, has added the ability to post free classified ads on its site. Topix offers a free alternative to both print and online classified newspaper sites, which have been banking on paid classified ads for years. Another direct competitor would be Craigslist, among others.

You can see a screen-shot of the layout to the Chicago ads below. Obviously, the number of ads is limited, however, I expect them to pick up with time.

According to Chris Tolles, who posted on the Topix blog about the classified system and how it fits into Topix mission:

"Our goal here at Topix.net is to help people connect better with their community -- whether that be where they live, or what they're interested in. We started by collecting news from all over the net and using technology to automatically tag it with geo-location and topic."

I am a big fan of Topix.net and the moves that included the introduction of blog search results, mapping conversations and, most recently, a publisher platform. I think this move by Topix.net further hedges the bet of its old media ownership, which has been looking for additional revenue streams due to the decline in print readership. Maybe they should look to Topix because I feel Topix gets it.