It’s official: Oodle to power Facebook Marketplace
Beginning in Q1, Oodle will power Facebook's new, improved Marketplace, bringing with it a vast network of listings that includes listings from Oodle-powered MySpace Classifieds.
Oodle CEO Craig Donato disclosed the deal on his company blog.
Speculation surfaced last week about a deal. At the time, Donato couldn't comment.
"This agreement gives us a great opportunity to extend our vision for a community marketplace -- a new generation of online classifieds where you can buy, sell and pass along items with people you know or people you at least know something about," Donato wrote.
In a conversation with us earlier today, Donato shared his vision of community marketplace: Before people get to the point in which they're ready to post a public classified ad, they've typically exhausted other avenues that include selling or giving the item for sale to friends. "We want to make sure that if people have things they're simply not using, and they want to give them to a friend. Social networks are a great mechanism for having those sorts of conversations with people you know. And when you want to sell something to someone, you may want to do it with someone you know something about."
As an example, Donato said, "I don't want to sell my car to my friend. But I don't want some random guy with an anonymous I.D. showing up at my house to test drive my car."
As we've pointed out before, the buying and selling of stuff between friends -- even between friends of friends -- takes a different sort of social contract, especially if you hope to remain friends.
Donato acknowledged the importance of that: "How do you enable the appropriate trade between friends and also, how do you enable people to sell safely to people they know something about?"
That's exactly the challenge Oodle and Facebook are facing, he said. And he's entusiastic about the possibilities. "The Internet's grown up a lot in the last five or six years introducing this whole dimension of identity and social networks. It hasn't really been effectively applied to classifieds. I think our opportunity here is to really do that."
