41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 1 1 Max Mancini: eBay RI AL “You blur the lines between a desktop experience and a Web experience, and that’s really where everything is headed.” TE —Max Mancini I CO PY RI GH TE D MA f you ask anyone about online auctions, chances are the first place they would name is eBay. Ironically, eBay is more than just an auction. In fact, eBay’s business is transactions.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 2 Web 2.0 Heroes eBay’s business is centered on charging a fee for bringing a seller and a buyer together. This transaction fee is how eBay makes money regardless of whether a marble, a car, or a piece of land in Texas is sold. It really doesn’t matter what is sold as long as a transaction occurs.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 3 Max Mancini: eBay third-party developers. And today, more than 25 percent of the listings on eBay come through third-party tools. Disruptive Innovation’s role is to inspire innovation through experimentation. We study trends and provide infrastructure and resources that encourage developers, internally—and also externally—to think and create within the boundaries of their known silos. The trends we concentrate on shift over time.
1998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 4 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 4 Web 2.0 Heroes This leads into the primary question: How would you and eBay define Web 2.0? I consider the first mashup—the Craigslist/Google Maps mashup—as an embodiment of my view of Web 2.0. Somebody once described it as the “atomization of the Web.” It’s taking all of the components and making them available so that people can combine them in ways that you would never have considered, or that are very personal for an individual experience.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 5 Max Mancini: eBay What needs to evolve is the monetization models. The commerce-based transaction model and the pure ad model as they exist today need to evolve significantly. I don’t know what that’s going to look like, but it will have to evolve; otherwise a lot of companies will go out of business. Having some companies going out of business seems to be a part of how things do evolve. That’s true.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 6 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 6 Web 2.0 Heroes So, getting back to the definition of Web 2.0, it’s creating a lot more openness so you can integrate things that you would have had to build from scratch before; how you manage rights and security within that model has yet to be determined. In the early days, even Facebook was hammered on how much they shared information.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 7 Max Mancini: eBay I can speak more specifically about Adobe AIR because we’ve built a product on that. There’s a lot of momentum around creating interactive experiences leveraging Web 2.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 8 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 8 Web 2.0 Heroes enough, you can get it, right? I just don’t see the average person being connected continuously, with the exception of through their mobile device. In developing countries, mobile is the way most people connect to the Internet. Although there’s a lot of innovation and excitement around Web 2.0, certainly in Silicon Valley, the mobile investments are starting to pick up again.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 9 Max Mancini: eBay cheap to publish, right? As an individual I can create a hugely popular blog with almost no marketing experience or background team. Self-publishing has enabled many things to happen; frankly, it’s supporting a lot of the economy, from a page-view perspective, in that you can distribute widgets in content, things like that.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 10 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 10 Web 2.0 Heroes Do you believe that shift will come? Do you think people will be willing to tag information? I actually do, but I don’t know what the trigger is going to be. Let me tell you why I think that: I hate to use Facebook as an example, but they changed a lot of things with some basic activities.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 11 Max Mancini: eBay love control; they need predictability. Wall Street does not like unpredictability, and if you release that control too much, you run the risk of catastrophe. That’s why it will take a long time to get there. Shifting back to Web 2.0, what has eBay done in the Web 2.0 space that you would consider really cool? First, we built a widget in May of this year called eBayToGo. You can take a look at it at http://togo.ebay.com.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 12 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 12 Web 2.0 Heroes The third is distribution into the digital living room, which is one of those fits and starts. It’s tried, but hasn’t gone anywhere. Third parties have created things for eBay through our platform, like this company called BuyOff, in Austin, Texas, when they launched with Time/Warner cable in Austin. They’re also launching across a lot of Time/Warner areas with eBay in the cable set-top box. Pretty interesting.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 13 Max Mancini: eBay invest a lot of development dollars. The differentiation is not going to be investment dollars on the technology side; the technology is getting easier and easier to use. It’s going to be entirely based on user experience and what information are you combining in the right way. Is there anything about Web 2.
41998c01.qxd:Blogging Heroes 14 2/24/08 7:26 PM Page 14 Web 2.0 Heroes • • • monetization models really have to evolve. The commerce-based transaction model and the pure ad model as they exist today need to evolve significantly. Web 2.0 is creating more openness in integrating things that you would have had to build from scratch before. Nobody has even started looking at how you manage rights and security within that.
