Oodle’s Craig Donato on the emerging Social Marketplaces category

Oodle has had its sight set of leveraging the power of social networks to facilitate classified marketplace transactions for some time now. Here’s a short video clip from June 2010 positioning Oodle as a Social Classifieds provider for rental properties:

As the video explains, Oodle also powers Facebook Marketplace. Recently, Oodle announced that they had extended their reach on Facebook Marketplace by providing new features that further leverage the power of Facebook’s social graph, as explained in this TechCrunch article.

In addition, Oodle has recently acquired a social networking service through acquisition of Grouply with an eye towards moving the Social Graph beyond (just) friends. Facebook in turn has acquired Yardsellr – a social buying and selling platform – which TechCrunch describes as “an eBay for Facebook, except without the auctions”.

TechCrunch also had a blog post from November 2010 titled Will the Real “eBay of Social” Please Stand Up?, where they interviewed Oodle CEO Craig Donato about the emerging Social Marketplaces category. This video can be viewed below:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The Social Marketplaces space is really just a segment of the broader Social Commerce space. Look for a lot of innovation – and the consequent winners and losers – in these areas in 2011.

glenn