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

Hyperlocal – Core Dimensions (Part 1)

This is the second in a series of posts on key dimensions of Hyperlocal. Other posts in this series are:

• HyperLocal – a Framework
• Hyperlocal – Core Dimensions (Part 2)
• Hyperlocal – Key Technologies

In the initial post in this series, I introduced the following core dimensions of Hyperlocal/Local:

1. Local News/Journalism
2. Local Business/Commerce
3. Local Advertising
4. Local Community
5. HyperLocal Business Models

This post will briefly explore the first 2 dimensions – Local News and Local Business/Commerce.

Local/Hyperlocal News

An important service to the Local community is News about the Community, or Community perspectives and reactions to the News. A nice definition of HyperLocal News is provided by Christopher Wink here: Hyperlocal news: a definition.

Keeping Informed about HyperLocal News Media

Here are a few of the sites I regularly visit to keep track of happenings in the Local/Hyperlocal News media space:

• BuzzMachine – Jeff Jarvis’ blog
• News Innovation
• Journalism 2.0 – Mark Briggs’ blog
• Lost Remote
• Media Transparent
• HyperlocalBlogger – Matt McGee

Sites

There are many, many Hyperlocal blogs and websites currently servicing their local communities. Wink provides a nice overview of some of the major ones in his post Hyperlocal news sites worth following.

Platform Providers

This is a core area of innovation at present, and a slew of recent acquisitions by major media companies of hyperlocal news platform providers illustrates this point.

Some of the key innovators:

• Patch
• Everyblock
• Outside.in
• NowPublic
• Breaking News Network
• Spot.us
• Google, and again

Citizen Journalism

Often Hyperlocal news sites leverage Citizen Journalists as contributors to their site. A very interesting example of this approach is Examiner.com, which I blogged about here.

Real-time News Feeds

Finally, with the rise of Twitter, real-time geotagged feeds are also breaking onto the scene. Pat Kitano‘s Hyperlocal Curation of Real Time News post from November 2009 provides some interesting examples. Kitano’s Breaking News Network is a powerful example of location-relevant breaking news.

And of course, Twitter has launched location-based Trending Topics, would should add additional impetus to this trend.

Local Business/Commerce

Here, we’re talking about the commercial aspect of HyperLocal. A profound insight into the potential de-coupling of “core” Local News from Local Business services was recently delivered by Clay Shirky at the Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in September 2009. A must-listen-to presentation IMHO.

There are many, many players and platforms that service local business needs, with many more soon to come no doubt. Here are a smattering of players in a very competitive space:

Business Listings – General

• Google
• YellowPages.com
• Superpages
• Yellowbook
• Yell.com
• InfoUSA
• Acxiom
• Localeze
• CitySearch
• CitySquares
• Local.com
• Yodle
• City.com
• Business.com
• Insider Pages
• ThinkLocal
• CityVoter

Business Listings – Niche

• Yelp
• Urbanspoon

Services – Niche

• Craigslist
• Oodle
• AutoTrader.com
• Monster.com
• MLSlistings
• Realtor.com
• Zillow
• Trulia
• HelpHive
• My Builder
• ServiceMagic

Shopping

• Google
• ShopLocal
• ShopCity
• Milo
• NearbyNow

As you can see, there are a number of different spaces by which software providers and hosting sites are seeking to provide services for local commerce. In the next post, we’ll look at two additional hyperlocal/local dimensions: Advertising and Community.

glenn