Facebook Lets Oodle Power Their Marketplace
Today Oodle has announced that they’ve been chosen to power the Facebook marketplace. If you’ve been checking out the Facebook marketplace recently you would have noticed that many of the postings haven’t been updating. For whatever reason, it looks like the company was having some issues managing their marketplace. My guess is that they’ve determined that their time is best spent investing in the platform, Connect, and advertising optimization.
Back in July I wrote about how Oodle now powers MySpace classifieds. Oodle is forging some pretty hefty partnerships and may ultimately give Craigslist a run for their money. Currently they are far behind. The newly developed version of the marketplace will be available in the first quarter of 2009. Unfortunately no exact date has been set. Honestly, it’s somewhat odd to say Facebook make this type of partnership.
Why not just have an Oodle powered application on the Facebook platform rather than a distinctly separate application which is promoted directly by Facebook? I can guarantee that any other company would jump at the opportunity to get promotion directly from Facebook while running an application on their platform. This is one of the first partnerships that we’ve seen Facebook forge with outside companies when it comes to running a Facebook promoted application.
One has to wonder if this could result in the eventual launch of a Facebook Music or Facebook Movies in the near future through 3rd party agreements. For the time being we’ll have to wait and see but this is most definitely a huge win for Oodle. One thing to note is that Facebook has stated that Oodle will “be integrated into the site similar to other third-party applications”, so it may not be much different from existing apps.
I’m guessing that this agreement is more of a promotional agreement that benefits Oodle significantly and reduces overhead for Facebook. Unfortunately we won’t be able to see how the application is integrated until it’s released in the next few months.
