Video: eBay's Chief Disruption Officer: UI to eBay's "commerce operating system" could be left to others

Meet Max Mancini. Although he's not a newcomer to the eBay family, he does have a new title at the commerce giant: Senior Director of Disruptive Innovation. It's the first time I've ever heard of such a title (although why not just make it CDO: Chief Disruption Officer?) and a couple of weeks ago, Mancini was on tour to talk a little bit about what his new job is about, why eBay isn't resting on its laurels (even though little seems to be changing in its user interface), and what we can expect from the company down the road.

I first asked Mancini to explain where the room for disruption and innovation is (from eBay's perspective) and then, second, to point ZDNet's readers in the direction of something more tangible, representing where eBay might be heading. The result is a two-parter video. Part I below is a sit-down interview with Mancini. Part II is a demonstration of a new user interface to eBay codenamed San Dimas that's based on Adobe's yet-to-be-released Apollo platform. Two see a few still images of San Dimas in action, check out our screen gallery...(continued below)

	See Part I of my eBay video series: An interview with eBay's Sr. Director of Disruptive Innovation Max Mancini: During the interview, Mancini discusses the two key areas he's looking to disrupt: First, the buyer experience and second, social commerce. To see the interview, just check out the video.		See Part II of my eBay video series: It's a demonstration of San Dimas: an new UI prototype from eBay: In the demonstration, Mancini shows how the company is leveraging new rich media platforms like Adobe's Apollo to build interfaces that are more engaging and interactive. To see the demonstration, click here.

The timing of the interview was rather serendipitous given how, one week later, Adobe was putting on its Engage event where it opened the kimono on Apollo, due to ship later this year. eBay showed off San Dimas at Engage as well and talked about how Apollo's chief selling proposition to an enterprise developer like eBay was its cross platform capabilities (the ability to write a Flash-based application once, and run it anywhere). 

Moving forward, the two key areas that Mancini says he's focusing on are the buyer experience and social commerce. Anybody who visits eBay on a regular basis will tell you that there's plenty of room for improvement in its user interface. Mancini says the company has been watching the Web trend away from experiences based on Web flows (fill out form, submit, fill out another form, submit, etc.) and more towards a rich experience of the sort that Adobe's Flash (an integral part of Apollo) supports. For example, a listing experience that's more drag n' drop based, photos that are easier to post and browse (see image below), and searches of eBay that are easier to save for re-use. Much of these concepts can be seen in the San Dimas demonstration.

While Mancini discussed how the company is looking to enliven its UI, I pointed out that there are plenty of things eBay could be doing to make buyers more productive with the existing Web flow on eBay. For example, much like with the way check boxes work in Yahoo Mail! (and other browser-based apps like it), eBay should offer me the ability to tell it which listings I don't want to see any more. This way, when I search eBay for something like a Sennheiser microphone (for podcasting), my search results aren't routinely filled with items that I've already rejected as something I'd never buy (proof that it doesn't matter how pretty or interactive you make a UI if the fundamentals aren't right).

Social commerce? What the heck is that?

Perhaps the more interesting of Mancini's two areas of focus is the one he calls Social Commerce. Mancini refers to this as "sharing information to create new trust models." It sounds more complicated than it is. The basic idea is to do what LinkedIn.com does. But instead of a referral model where I want to know Sue and LinkedIn discovers she and I have a mutual acquaintance in Bob automates the introduction from there, eBay would apply the "Kevin Bacon rule" as it's known to commerce instead. Let's say I want a Sennheiser microphone. Using the same chain of mutual acquaintances, eBay might be able to automate the introduction to a seller of that microphone who is trusted by someone I know (or by someone else that someone I know knows). 

Ultimately, whereas LinkedIn.com does the matchmaking in a talent seeking/offering context and eBay wants to offer the matchmaking in a commerce context, I can't imagine either context being one that the other company wouldn't want to be involved with. Given that both companies have something to offer the other in the way of established users and architecture, perhaps an acquisition of LinkedIn (or a LinkedIn competitor like Plaxo) is in eBay's cards.

But perhaps the real Holy Grails for eBay are...

There were two eBay opportunities that Mancini and I touched on, but didn't get too far with. Each, if you ask me, is a potential Holy Grail for eBay. The first of these has to do with eBay's extensive library of Web services application programming interfaces (APIs).  With so many APIs, it's conceivable that eBay could one day leave the development of its user interfaces completely up to third parties. Why not? Right? Sure, eBay could offer some base-level of functionality through its Web form or even Apollo-based user interfaces. But with all those APIs in the wild, and all those developers out there, many of which are already taking advantage of eBay's APIs, the likelihood that some developer other than eBay might come up with something even more innovative than eBay could ever imagine is pretty good. When I asked Mancini the "what if" question, he just replied "wouldn't that be great?" In other words, "if our ecosystem gets to the point that we're just developing infrastructure and we can let the eBay community worry about innovations in user interfaces..."   And I agree.  Which led me to the next eBay Holy Grail.

Instead of eBay offering APIs alone, why not do what Salesforce.com did when it offered a hosted CRM/SFA-operating system where developers could build applications in Salesforce's APEX programming language and host that code on Saleforce's systems. Instead of using APEX and focusing in on CRM and SFA (although APEX can easily tackle other application types), eBay could develop something similar called EBEX that includes a commerce-specific programming language to ease the pain of building commerce-enabled applications and to make scalability (eg: Christmas season-like scalability) eBay's concern. Then, one can only imagine what happens when someone figures out how to build an application that's a union of the two.

Here's the first video (the interview):