With Growth Slowing, eBay Gets Innovative

When Meg Whitman took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in mid-October, she announced that eBay had made more changes in the previous months than in the last three years combined. She wasn't kidding. The 11-year-old auction site's interface had long been a confusing morass of links and menus. No longer. Now the focus is on making the site more appealing to buyers through easier navigation, new ways to browse and more reasons to hang around. The strategy seems to be working: There's a feeling of freshness and fun the site hasn't had in years.

To that end, the number of new buyer tools introduced in the last several months is staggering:

• A downloadable eBay Desktop application allows users to bid and get streaming price updates without opening a web browser.
• Three new widgets can be used on blogs and social networks outside eBay's walls: eBay To Go,GiftBay and eBay Marketplace for Facebook.
• Bid Assistant automatically places bids for a buyer.
• eBay Countdown is an easier (read: more in-your-face) way to keep track of auctions that are just about to close.
• eBay Deal Finder helps you seek out items that will close soon but have no bids entered yet

I found these new features to be pretty interesting and relating well back to the Enterprise 2.0 article for today's class... at least beneath the surface.  In a lot of organizations employees are feeling overwhelmed by the way email is being used as a single point of communication and discussion for anything and everything.  Likewise, eBay feels its customers want more diverse options in how they can utilize the site.  For me, eBay Desktop might be a very good option because it give back control of my web browser.  How many times have you been surfing eBay and had multiple windows or tabs open for similar items you may want to bid on?  eBay Desktop centralizes your eBay browsing to a single application and brings a focus to your eBay'ing.  eBay Countdown would also be useful to keep track of when your active auctions are coming to a close.  A number of times I've lost auctions because I forgot about the closing time on them.

Does anyone else know of ways other organizations are using Web 2.0 (or other technologies) to provide their customers and/or employees better ways to interact and navigate content?  Surely eBay isn't the only one, but certainly an online business that needed to improve its navigation and access to content.