eBay News: Facebook to Become an eBay Competitor?

As eBay turns toward social networking features via the OpenSocial platform and an increasing accumulation of community-oriented features, Facebook may be making a matching turn toward ecommerce. Social networking sites have long struggled to monetize their core businesses, but the latest plan at Facebook is to implement a payments system similar in many ways to eBay's relationship with PayPal. In the short term, this will enable Facebook members to buy from and sell virtual items to another on-site, but in the long term, given Facebook's structure and user interface, there's no reason why it couldn't become a classified ads or trading platform similar to eBay or to Craigslist, with a ready-made userbase in the hundreds of millions.

Does 2009 mark the beginning of a convergence trend between social networking and ecommerce, especially in the user-to-user space? If so, eBay's new direction—away from user-to-user emphases—may make a kind of sense, given the much more exciting and loyalty-inspiring platforms that social networking sites offer. More at:

     • Newser
     • Equimedia
     • NBC Dallas-Forth Worth
     • Brand Republic