Markslist: Facebook touts its own tat bazaar Facebook is looking to kill yet another reason to ever leave its walled garden with the launch of a classifieds service. The Facebook Marketplace will allow users to post item listings and then complete the sale outside of the social network. Users can post their ads for free and use the listings for either new or used items …
Kind of makes one wonder what he gets out of this. Then it hit me.. If I contact someone about buying a couch, I'll lay odds that suddenly I'll see a ton of ads for couches, and foot rests and coffee tables and maybe pizza and beer. Clever, that one is, to find another method of mining users data, etc.
Yes I'm a Facebook user, mostly family stuff, and will state with no hesitation that it's about the most irritating jumble of bad design, bad functionality, and generally offensive policies that I've ever seen from a major corporation.
They literally do nothing well, including sell advertising.
In fact, one of the reasons why I finally installed an ad-blocker in my browser is because I was SO tired of Facebook's endless stream of ads for things that I have utterly no interest in, from companies that I would never, ever do business with.
This is bound to be a disaster. I can see no way that Facebook could do this without balling up the whole works.
God only knows WHAT their gobsmackingly bad algorithms will do with an endless stream of used furniture ads.
And honestly, given the ease and ubiquity of Craigslist I can't see why anyone would bother with Facebook to sell their used crap.
"They literally do nothing well, including sell advertising."
Which I guess makes them worthy competitors to eBay & Gumtree.
(Craigslist may be different in some places, but around here at least it's 99% drugs, used panties, and various euphemisms for same e.g. "FOUR and TWENTY pies", "garden STONEs and ROCKS", "CK with HONEYDEW", etc...)
There's nothing wrong with this feature. I have a blank account on FB that I use to go around various pre-loved / second-hand groups. It was always a pain having to trawl the posts to see what was on sale, if it was still on sale, etc.
This just takes something that's already happening and streamlines the process giving the user more functionality.
I know FB is shit. I use it for second hand stuff and stalking fit female friends for that holiday bikini shot. Give them credit though when they actually make things better on their service, regardless what their agenda is.
Protection?
Fleabay has a problem resolution system in place, it's shite but they have one. What's Zuck, the master data dealer, got in place to stop deals going south? Given the over zealous nature of Zuck's puritanical stormtroopers of taste removing anything with a slight amount of flesh, I would imagine he'd be all over protecting his users from themselves but I suspect this is another whim of Zuck to block out Fleabay and Craiglist and "ZuckBay" (tm) will die a slow death when no one cares!
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