Ebay adds social networking features

Current "neighborhoods" include ones based around the iPhone, StarWars, and coffee.

Naturally, I checked out the latter.

Creating "long tail" communities around an unlimited number of mainstream and niche product categories is a very smart move by eBay, and at very little cost, since most of the content already existed, only not organized into a single and collaborative spot. Lots of eBay users are passionate about niche product categories, "StarWars" memobrillia is an obvious example, so creating a one stop shopping network that taps into each passion should yield more time spent on eBay, and result in greater transactions.

However, as Erick Schonfeld writes over at TechCrunch, eBay could go further. Lacking is any way of taking content from an eBay neighborhood, in the form of a widget, and placing it on more generic social networks such as Facebook.

What would really be smart would be if eBay allowed anyone to easily take any module on a neighborhood page—the reviews, the visual product search, the discussions, or the eBay blog posts—and embed them on other Web pages like Facebook, MySpace, or their blogs. People who are really into modern furniture might put that particular product-search module on their blog, for instance, just because it surfaces cool-looking Eames chairs and retro clocks available on eBay Making such widgets available would help draw more traffic into these shopping neighborhoods. And if eBay tied them into its affiliate-fee program that pays for each referral that results in a sale, you’d have these widgets all over the place.