eBay @ Web 2.0 Expo New York

The eBay Developers Program gang is freshly back from Web 2.0 Expo New York last week, showing off the eBay and PayPal platforms to web developers and designers. Check out InformationWeek and VentureBeat for what our fearless leader, Max Mancini, had to say from the show floor.

Visitors to our booth got to learn about eBay Developers Program, PayPal certifications, VUVOX, eBay Desktop, Firefox Companion for eBay and more. Developers building applications with the eBay API platform, such as Glaxstar, EffectiveUI, JDT Technologies, Aduci and Payloadz added their perspective and testimonials about their experience with the eBay development and PayPal certification process.

Rolf Skyberg packed his session on Platform Wars: A Brief History on Wednesday, and we also got to catch up with developers like WatchCount.com (a.k.a. helios825 on the Developer Forums), WidgetBucks/Mpire and Guru of Sales, who stopped by our booth as well.

If you missed us in New York, catch us in San Francisco, November 16-19 at Adobe MAX. eBay picked up a couple of coveted MAX Awards last year, and we're looking forward to meeting Flex, Flash, AIR and ColdFusion developers again this year!

-Delyn

Photo Credits to Delyn Simons and Lanz Tsang

Developers Get Social in Chicago

We all know that sometimes the best part of conferences is what happens outside of the sessions. Developers got social this year at eBay Developers Conference on our eBay DevCon Twitter. Chicago is a fun town and so was looking into the thought cloud surrounding all of the ideas and conversations happening in the hallways of our DevCon event. Blogging, photo sharing and adding friends from our Facebook event were also popular ways to spend time in our Developer Lounge.

Of course there were also offline ways to network as well, including our Beer Bash and PayPal Party at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Online or in person, the eBay developer community is a social bunch.

- Delyn

Highlights from 2008 eBay Developers Conference

We had a fantastic time here at eBay Developers Conference in Chicago this week right before eBay Live! On Monday, the major buzz for the show and the blogosphere was around Project Echo and the opening keynote demo showcasing the ability for developers to embed their applications built on the eBay platform where hundreds of thousands of sellers manage their businesses on eBay.com.  On Tuesday,  Mike Shaver, Chief Evangelist for Mozilla spoke to developers on the same day that Firefox 3.0 browser launched, celebrating Download Day 2008 right here at eBay DevCon and giving a shoutout to the Firefox Companion for eBay. woot woot!

eBay also honored ten members of our developer community, who are building applications on the eBay platform for achievements in improving user experience and customer service, increasing platform engagement and extending eBay in exciting new directions:

eBay Star Developer Award winners:

•    DSR Rockstar: ShipRush by Z-Firm (USA)
•    Most Innovative Application: Jaast for Wii by Scendix Software (Germany)
•    Early Adopter: iRibbit by Aduci (USA)
•    Service to the Developer Community: Joe Fox (elzorro) of BD Network (UK)
•    Best Design: Kyozou Widget by Kyozou (Canada)

Runners-up:

•    DSR Rockstar: ezSupport for eBay by HostedSupport (USA) 
•    Most Innovative Application: Mobile Alerts for Sellers by ahTXT (USA)
•    Early Adopter:  GarageBuy by iwascoding (Germany)
•    Service to the Developer Community: Anthony Sukow of  Terapeak (Canada) 
•    Best Design: Video advertisements for eBay listings by Vzaar (UK)

For those of you keeping count, we've got winners represented across 4 countries from our global e-commerce platform. Congratulations to our 2008 winners!!

For full coverage of all the news out of eBay Developers Conference 2008, check out the eBay Developer blog. Have a great eBay Live!, and don't forget to check out the dozens of the eBay Developers Program members who are exhibiting in the Partner Pavillion.

- Delyn

DevCon (Precursor to eBay Live!) Has Begun!

If eBay Live! is the extroverted older brother who plays quarterback on the high school football team and quickly gets to know everyone at a party, the Developers Conference is his quiet, brilliantly geeky younger brother who builds a rocketship in the garage and is consulted by NASA even before he goes to MIT.

The long and short of this elaborately contrived analogy is that the Developers' Conference, the not-so-well-known precursor to eBay Live! (unless you're a developer, in which case it's the only event that really matters) began in Chicago yesterday. The Developers Conference is the biggest event in eBay's Developers Program.

You can keep tabs on the goings-on at the event through the Developers Blog. It already has a slew of reporting on events avidly followed by our Developer community, including Rajiv Dutta's Keynote Address, eBay's Product Roadmap, Max Mancini's Keynote, some of our Web service code lab sessions, and our own occasional Chatter blogger Delyn's rundown on this year's Star Developer Awards.

Developer's Program: Check out eBay Flyer!

Hey There,

Faithful Chatter readers may know that our friend and guest blogger for the eBay Developer's Program, Delyn Simons, is out enjoying her new baby. Filling in for her while she's out is the very talented Gail Bower. She's using her first appearance on The Chatter to tell us about the new eBay Flyer. Enjoy!

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What’s old is new again!  With eBay Flyer, you can now quickly create the familiar “FOR SALE” paper flyers, complete with tear-strips along the bottom, so interested buyers can easily find you on eBay.  eBay Flyer is fantastic for selling those large, awkward or locale-specific items like couches, TVs, cars, furniture, scuba gear and anything else you don’t want to or can’t haul to the post office.

Creating a flyer is super easy, free, and your listing information is even already in the flyer!  Post flyers (legally, of course) all around town … college campuses, churches, stores, health clubs, the Laundromat – you get the idea. The potential buyer can take a tear-strip off the flyer and when they return home, they simply enter the URL on the tear-strip which will take them directly to your auction.  It’s another great way to get the word out about items you have for sale on eBay.

Try it today and you may wind up selling more and selling faster.  That’s money in your pocket!

The Best Stuff on eBay is now on Facebook

My wonderful colleague Delyn usually covers the eBay Developers beat on the Chatter, but she's taking some time off after becoming a mommy (for the second time!). So I've stepped in to give you a glimpse into what our intrepid band of developers are up to.

Delyn's previous post mentioned the eBay Marketplace for Facebook application, just one of the many ways our Developers program is trying to ride the popularity of social networking sites (like Facebook) in order to help eBay members find great deals or promote items they're selling.

But what does a social networking site like Facebook have to do with your items for sale on eBay or with that hard-to-find item you've been looking for? Here's Trisha Okubo from our Developers Program to tell you more:

Do you get frustrated trying to uncover the hidden treasures on eBay? It's OK -- it happens to the best of us. In eBay's crowded, bustling marketplace, it's often easy to miss the gems.

But now, if you're on Facebook, there's an easier way to find the cool stuff on eBay. Join the eBay community on Facebook, where you can see and share the best stuff on eBay with your other Facebook friends. Who might share it with their Facebook friends. Who, in turn, might share it with their Facebook friends. And so on. The business school gurus call it "viral marketing."

As you use the eBay Marketplace application, you'll find handpicked goods from your Facebook friends and the Community at large. You'll find stuff you and your friends care about -- anything and everything from the robin's egg blue 19th century teapot your BFF (Best Friends Forever in social networking lingo) has her eye on to your nephew's video game picks (Guitar Hero III, anyone?).

eBay Marketplace lets you share what you're doing on eBay with your friends on Facebook. Did you just list a gorgeous jewelry case for sale on eBay? Or are you itching to brag to your friends about the pair of Marc Jacobs round toe boots you just won? If you choose, eBay Marketplace can share the news with your friends on Facebook automatically. 

But you can do more than just share your stuff with your friends. If you run across the perfect vintage midcentury modern lamps for your sister's redecorated living room, you can share them with her with the click of a button. Or -- you could scoop them up and get a jump on your Christmas shopping, if you haven't finished it already.  :)

Community Next: "Community Is Your Most Valuable Asset"

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

In early October Trisha Okubo, Choon Chong and Sunny Li from eBay's Platform & Innovation team attended Community Next, a Silicon Valley event about social network platforms. It turned out to be a hands-on lesson in how to create a viral community application. The eBay team's participation was important because it helped us improve our understanding of developing successful applications for the emerging world of social networking sites - a world that some of our buyers and sellers have already started exploring (for example, see my earlier Chatter Blog post about the eBay Marketplace for Facebook application).

Choon entered the conference's Iron Coder competition, where he was tasked to build a Facebook application and recruit as many users as possible — all within 24 hours. Read on as Trisha and Sunny re-cap their learnings from the event and top tips for building a truly viral app (Gesundheit!)

- Delyn

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So, does Choon have the stuff to win the $5000 IronCoder contest?  Take a look at his entry and decide for yourself. Aptly named ForeignPoke, it allows you to do stuff to your friends on Facebook in the language of your choice. So — you can smack your friends in German, kiss them in French, or bite them in Italian.

At the 24 hour mark, ForeignPoke, was far from first place (with 25 users to the winner's 147)—and the $5,000 prize. (It seems that the friends we contacted to add the application don't check e-mail on Friday night.) But now, less than two weeks later, ForeignPoke has grown on its own to over 2,000 users, and an ardent fan even volunteered to translate the actions into his native Swedish!

What can we learn from ForeignPoke about how to create a viral application? Three simple rules:

(1) Start with share-worthy content. The foundation of a viral application is content, and if it's content that people don't want to share, you're out of the game before you even started playing. At the heart of ForeignPoke is the messages, which allow you to poke your friends in languages as diverse as Chinese, Hebrew, and even "Yoda." Poke you I must, as he would say.

(2) Make it easy for people to share. Aim to eliminate roadblocks—and any friction that makes it harder for people to share information with one another. ForeignPoke makes it super simple to poke friends—all you have to do is choose a message, select a language, and decide which friend(s) to poke. Automatically generated "news feed" announcements that describe the poking taking place (e.g. "Choon just poked Trisha in Pirate!") further simplify the information sharing process.

(3) Create incentives for people to share. Incentives can take many forms—and don't need to be monetary. Points can represent rewards, and people will collect them for bragging rights—or to move to higher levels within the application. As ForeignPoke was built literally overnight, it's currently limited to the core poking functionality (if you're wondering what I'm talking about, read the Wikipedia entry on poking on Facebook). But the most natural extension of the application is the introduction of points and levels. The more you poke others, the more points you collect. And while collecting points could be an end in and of itself, we could reward the most active users by, for example, unlocking new languages or actions.

Remember that ForeignPoke was built in a few short hours as part of an exercise during the CommunityNext event. But we'll use the lessons we learned to build applications that help our own Community succeed on social networking sites.

- Trisha and Sunny

Traveling with Rolf to Emerce e.day

Rolf Skyberg, Disruptive Innovator here at eBay, recently returned from a whirlwind trip to France and the Netherlands. Back from his travels, he gives his take on Paris, Rotterdam, high-speed trains, humor that doesn't always translate, as well as the exotic (and to some, inexplicable) appeal of mayonnaise below. Enjoy!

-Delyn

Rendezvous'ing with Max Mancini, the director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation in Paris, we first met with our French team to discussion innovation, web trends and how business gets done. We learned quite a lot from them including how they manage their projects and all the exciting things they are developing. Again it reminded us how truly a global company eBay is.

Taking the high-speed "Thalys" train from Paris to Rotterdam in a short three hours brought us within walking distance to the primary reason for our trip, Emerce e.day. Billing itself as the "premier event of 2007 where inspiring speakers and innovative companies shed light on the latest technologies and trends," I had been invited to speak after my presentation at the Web 2.0 EXPO in San Francisco. After enjoying a speaker's dinner hosted by Rotterdam's city council, I returned to my hotel room and really set about revising my presentation for a European audience.

When I'd presented my Web 2.0 presentation earlier to our Paris office, some of my slides were unintentionally hilarious while other jokes fell flat on their face. Apparently some things don't translate well across languages. My new presentation for e.day included references to windmills (a Dutch favorite), a little bit of American history, and a new message overall: "Web 2.0 is an era, not a thing." The morning of my presentation, my message carried well as I presented to the packed audience in a renovated Dutch Koffie factory. Whipping through 477 slides in only 35 minutes, I drank the three bottles of water that had been placed on my podium while the group of international business people quizzed me about community, Web 3.0, and what to think of the internet in general. Max explored the conference floor visiting our Marktplaats team and attending other sessions while I talked to some small groups throughout the day. We left the conference inspired by the enthusiasm of everyone in attendance.

I think the biggest message that I took from the e.day conference and meeting with our worldwide teams was that we all have the same basic needs. Languages and cultures may be different, but deep down we all want and fear the same things. Business is important, but the connections we make with our loved-ones is stronger. Everyone wants a place to call their own, but to be invited to share in someone else's space. We fear that change will bring turmoil, but it's too exciting to turn back now. The world is a big place, and friends help lead the way when the path gets dark. I know that by embracing these learnings and accepting them as simple truths, success will surely follow.

PS: I also learned that around the world, everybody likes fried potatoes, and the Dutch like theirs with mayonnaise.

- Rolf Skyberg

eBay Desktop Wins 2 Adobe MAX Awards: RIA and People's Choice

Alan Lewis just got back from the Adobe MAX show in Chicago, where eBay Desktop won 2 awards: Best Rich Internet Application and People's Choice. The application (which is in public beta now) shows what is possible with eBay's API platform, a point that was not lost on the developers and press in attendance.

Check out the industry blog and media coverage from GigaOM, Mashable, InformationWeek and ZDNet. And here are the awards, placed in our eBay Innovation Showcase (a.k.a. the end-cap of our cubicle):

- Delyn

Winners of eBay Widget Contest

  Congratulations to the winners of the eBay Innovate Widget Contest. These developers built their widgets using the eBay platform: 

• 1st place winner (of a Sony PSP3) was the iPhone My Ebay application by SilkSystem Solutions.

Search, Watch, and Bid from your iPhone. I thas a customized interface for the iPhone while leveraging key features such as page transitions, number pad-pop up, etc.

• 2nd place winner (of an 80 GB Apple iPod Video) was the Vista sidebar tool by Intelligroup Ltd.

It provides notifications, at-a-glance information for your watching, bidding and selling lists, as well as feedback score and more from your Vista sidebar.

• 3rd Place winner (of an 8 GB Apple iPod Nano) was the My eBay Quickfeed for iGoogle by vallaeys from Top Tier Inc.

It features an RSS feed for iGoogle that automatically syncs with eBay to always show you the most up-to-date information about items you are watching, selling or bidding on, and lets you add a saved search.

• Developer community winner (of an iPod Shuffle) with 73 votes and 53% of the total was Auction Watch gadget for Vista Sidebar by Ty Kroll.

eBay Auction Watch allows you to track and bid on eBay auctions directly from your Windows Vista Sidebar. Integrated with your My eBay Bidding and Watching lists, details are updated automatically and seconds count down in real time.

Congratulations to all of these developers!

- Delyn