BTW, Chris Law did a podcast with me last week. You can find it here.
Podcast
Comments
3 responses to “Podcast”
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Toni,
Congrats on doing a good interview. There were a couple statements you made about eBay in this podcast (and at Web 2.0), however, that weren't accurate. The one I'll address on your blog concerns eBay's and Amazon's APIs and our model focusing mainly on affiliates.While I can't speak for our friends at Amazon, historically many of the applications built by eBay third party developers have focused on the eBay seller side. The developer apps built help eBay sellers manage their businesses. Today, 22% of eBay.com's listings are driven via third party applications. Also, about 90% of our publicly available APIs are seller focused.
Feel free to go to http://solutions.ebay.com to review these sell side applications. The cool thing about many of these sell side applications is developers have been able to monetize their apps by selling them to eBay sellers. Many have built nice businesses around this concept (both in the US and abroad) and been able to raise money based on this premise.
Besides the sell side, we also have a robust affiliate network of apps focusing on the searching and buying. You can find those in our Solutions Directory as well. We also have nice examples of Konfabulator developers using eBay's API as well.
Cheers,
Greg Isaacs
Director, eBay Developers Program -
Thanks very much for the comment Greg. I forget my exact words from the podcast, but here are my thoughts on the topic: eBay is a marketplace for buying and selling things. The eBay APIs are an extension of that marketplace meant to drive additional buying and selling of things, either via affiliates who send eBay new customers, or via seller apps that help existing eBay customers manage and sell products more efficiently. That's all great, except I believe it limits the range of apps 3rd party developers will create (there are only so many ways to drive more eBay auctions by a third party).
In order for a wider range of new web API based businesses to emerge, I believe we need to think more broadly about the core services that will enable them. Rather than asking developers to drive more of our existing businesses, I'd like to enable them to take pieces like photo albums, search, music serving or ad serving and create new products and businesses out of them. We're seeing the beginnings of this with maps mashups. The developers creating them are not focused on improving an existing marketplace, they are taking a core service like map serving and creating entirely new products and interaction models for the web (which might lead to new ways of making money).
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Toni,
Thanks for the response and clarification.
I agree with your points re: thinking more broadly about core services. Your model lends itself a bit better to this vision and I certainly like what you guys are trying to do. 🙂
Cheers,
Greg
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