Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: eBay's blockade strategy

Author:Andrew Wooldridge
Posted:10/8/1999; 9:24:41 AM
Topic:eBay's blockade strategy
Msg #:11858 (In response to 11840)
Prev/Next:11857 / 11859

It sounds like there aught to be a sort of universal auction "protocol" which anyone who wants to could start an auction server and get auction "feeds". What do I mean? Here's an analogy. Think of how newsgroups work - you dont see folks fighting over access to newsfeeds, or saying this is "my" newsgroup etc. Right now newsgroups have a sort of web-based equivalent in web-boards. Newsgroups are "open" with a common protocol, etc. whereas web-boards depend totally on their host website. Think of ebay as a web-board model. What if we came up with an auction equivalent of newsgroups? That way all those "auction tools" could read some common feed, just like newsreaders do, and no-one person or group "owns" the universal auction feeds, just like no-one person owns NNTP newsgroups.

Imagine an xml-based "auction protocol" where instead of you going to ebay or another specific site, you instead just "post" your auction to the web and it gets 'picked up' like a newsgroup message. Does this make sense? This would render the whole issue of yahoo vs amazon vs ebay auctions, because they would be forced to also take part in the "feed" or remain closed like a web-board.

So my vote is to start looking at some sort of auction equivalent to newsgroups.

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