Confronting insurmountable opportunities

Shopping.com gets hotel vertical ready

Interesting overview / review from Brian at ComparisonEngines.com. Some telling stuff:

Shopping.com plans to tightly integrate its Epinions reveiws into its new hotel vertical and bring “it’s proprietary assets - structure, organization, and productization” to the hotel category.

Meanwhile, the rich get richer

Google hires eBay's search guru: Louis Monier. Not clear that Monier is going to focus on Froogle - he says he doesn't know yet, and that he's interested in other stuff. That said, the possibilities in Froogle are pretty obvious. Battelle has the scoop.

Dating RSS?

Interesting comment from Dave Evans at Corante's Dating blog:

I'm waiting for more dating sites to offer up feeds of my matches, get that stuff out of my inbox, it's wasting time and effort on my part, and I'm paying you for quality service.

Microsoft announces IE support for RSS lists

Impressive announcement. Not so sure the extension is as impressive, but I suppose time will tell on that. The announcement and the demo, though, have caused quite a stir. For eCommerce, of particular note was this example:

One scenario I’m particularly excited about is the idea of being able to subscribe to my wife’s Amazon.com wish-list – we’ve been talking to the great folks at Amazon.com about using these extensions, and, at Gnomedex, Amar and I showed a prototype application working live against Amazon.com wish lists built using Amazon Web Services (built with the invaluable help of the Amazon.com Web Services team). You can see that on the Channel 9 video as well – it’s the best way to understand why this is so useful and interesting.

So, there it is, a new standard for merchants (as well as a lot of other people) to be able to publish into users' newsreaders.

I'm excited. This is the other side of the "Find" equation. We've heard an incredible amount about vertical search, but subscriptions to information pushed by trusted agents are now beginning to take hold. What we're now seeing is the creation of:

• the publisher / creator class
• the agent / connector class
• the consumer class

Everyone's talked about blogging and how it's revolutionizing things. Well, true - but only to a point. Blogs have certainly reduced the barrier to create content and to create referential links. However, the big change is the ability to subscribe to updated content from trusted sources.

With subscriptions, people are reading more, but searching less (yes, I know, TM Newsgator). Thus, it's the consumer class that's been enabled here - consumers can start choosing who can send them information, and they can force all other information to be vetted by one of their agents. And these agents are no longer massive media companies - instead they're small groups and/or collections of individuals that are aggregated in my newreader. People who the consumer believes is truly looking out for the consumer's best interest - not some advertiser's.

So, what happens when you push this idea into eCommerce? We'll soon find out!

Excellent capsule summary of del.icio.us

Funding: Seed funding in early April, 2005 (rumored $2 millionish) by Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Kopelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young.

What is it?

It is an open-bookmarking service with tagging. You tag your bookmarks (any URI, meaning a web page or a single blog post), which helps you organize the data. The exceptionally cool thing about delicious is that you can view the data that others have tagged in many different ways.

Slightly more, but still incredibly concise, overa at techcrunch.

More on the value of trust

I came across this posting - it's long, I don't agree with everything, but it's an interesting story and speaks to some of the issues that have been called out in the past:

"eBay has a ton of community feedback, but most of the members still remain faceless."

"When items come from a faceless vendor, with mostly textual sales copy, and a one off relationship, it is hard to build a brand and tell a story. That is the flaw of eBay, currently it is limiting how well it can allow it's members to tell stories. There will always be some disconnect between true value and price. Why not host merchant blogs or value added story building tools like that on eBay? "

"There is nothing on eBay which deeply motivates me to build a relationship with a merchant instead of bidding a few dollars cheaper to buy the same item off someone else."

"Search personalization, semantic web applications, and social filtering help guide people to certain channels and new ideas, helping people find what they love, and helping the ideas spread (causing the ideas to be refined and creating more content to place ads on)."

In part, to address these failings, eBay launched ProStores today. Will it work? Possibly, but ISB thinks that eBay may have misfired on the pricing.

Why RSS / Folksonomies are important

Jenny at the ShiftedLibrarian has posted a good dissection of some of what's important about folksonomies. The biggest issue when applying this thinking to ecommerce is teasing apart relevant issues. Ecmomerce has both:

• stable offers (important for retail, travel, new autos)
• changing offers (important for careers, personals, used classifieds)

For offers that change, there's some interesting stuff re: the "changing web" as described below. What does this mean for stable offers, though?

To me, the write-up below seems to mean, according to the below description, that Google will win on the searching of stable offers. I disagree - not 100%, but somewhat. I think there are things that Google doesn't do a great job of - specifically helping me to know whether or not I should trust the offer / offerer. Google is improving here, integrating reviews into Google Local, but this is an area of weakness. Who will be able to deliver a better solution?

Was Shopping.com Inflating Their Numbers?

So, I'd done some independent research into PriceTool's remarkable share of pageviews and unique visitors for Shopping.com.

All told, PriceTool drove from 32% of the uniques and 80% of the pageviews for Shopping.com's network in April. This fell to 14% of Shopping.com's uniques and 21% of Shopping.com's pageviews in May.

Why the dramatic fall? It seems that PriceTool has likely been serving either pop-ups and/or auto-refreshes / meta-refreshes that generated extra pageviews and uniques, but which were not user requested. Up until May, Media Metrix had counted these pageviews and uniques as real. Now, Media Metrix has stopped counting these uniques and pageviews towards PriceTool.

Where did the non-user generated pages come from? David at Internet Stock Blog and Jeff Moland at ReveNews have unearthed an interesting possiblity. Please note: nothing that I've unearthed directly connects PriceTool to ad ware.

Why eBay bought Shopping.com

Nothing earth-shaking here, but interesting posts on Internet Stock Blog with quotes from Rajiv Dutta:

So number one, it gives our sellers a new channel.

The second is increasingly our sellers are selling new in-season products… which requires a different channel, a different interface and a different experience

Next, some interesting details on the actual purchase from Brian at ComparisonEngines.com. Tons of minutia there, but interesting to see how quickly the deal got done, and that Shopping.com didn't actively put themselves on the block (or, so states their filing).

Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas

Great post by Scott Berkun about the perils of being too smart for your own good / dealing with someone who is. Some choice highlights:

Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.

If the group, as a collective, is only capable of approving B level work, it doesn’t matter how many A level ideas you bring to it. Focus groups or other outside sources of information can not give a team, or its leaders, a soul.

...

[N]o amount of intelligence can help an individual who is diligently working at the wrong level of the problem. Someone with wisdom has to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Um, hey. The hole you’re digging is very nice, and it is the right size. But you’re in the wrong yard.”

...

[S]hort term bits of data are neither reliable nor a wise way to go about making important long term decisions. Intelligent people do this all the time, and since it’s so commonly accepted as a rule of thumb (last time + the time before that), it’s often accepted in place of actual thinking.

...

So like pool, when it comes to defusing smart people who are defending bad ideas, you have to find ways to slow things down.

Go read the whole thing. It's worth it. Pointer from Werner Vogels.