Web2Summit: Backstage with Meg Whitman

I imagine there will be other people covering the details of my onstage conversation with Meg Whitman at the Web 2.0 Summit, so I thought I'd focus on a couple of questions I had on my list that we didn't get to on stage, but that Meg and I talked about backstage.

First, I raised an issue with Meg that had been brought up by Dale Dougherty, publisher of Make. eBay is one of the biggest sources of components for Make: projects, and Dale had spent some time trying to get eBay involved in Maker Faire, to no avail. He notes that with the current focus on green business, there's a real re-use and recycle story about eBay that they ought to be telling. Meg loved the idea, and thinks it's spot on.

Second, after the interview, Meg responded further to my Steve Ballmer-esque harangue for eBay to move more aggressively on the platform front. She reminded me that eBay was the first major web company to build APIs for third party developers. I responded that there's a big difference between a platform to enable add-ons to an application, and one that uses the application itself as a component of the larger, emergent internet operating system that we're calling Web 2.0. Meg insisted that even on that front, eBay is doing more that I might realize, and invited me to come down for a meeting with key folks there to understand better what they are doing. I'll look forward to that, and will let you know what I find out.

She denied the rumor that eBay has a shareholding in Joost She said that neither she nor eBay has any ownership interest in the company.

We talked a bit more than we did on stage about the free classified marketplace. Meg said that eBay's various free classified advertising businesses, like kijiji and marktplaats, are actually bigger in aggregate than Craigslist, largely because they are international in scope. The business model is contextual advertising, although on quick perusal of kijiji.com, I don't see any. (I do however see lots on domain typosquatter kijiki.com -- one of the problems with an unfamiliar name like kijiji. EBay should have bought as many of the variations as they could. (And as to the name, kijiji is Swahili for "village." Meg remarked on the difficulty of finding domain names that are meaningful, memorable, and available worldwide.)

Finally, despite her somewhat dismissive onstage comment about Etsy as "a cute little business," it was pretty clear to me that eBay is watching Etsy very closely. I also asked Meg about threadless, the user-designed t-shirt marketplace, and whether eBay would be interested not just in aggregating resale of existing goods, but in aggregating demand for manufacturing. She hadn't heard of threadless, but clearly found the idea thought-provoking.

Update: some of the coverage of the onstage conversation: Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian summarizes the general flow of the conversation with Meg, Eric Savitz liveblogs for Barrons, Clint Boulton at eWeek focuses on the discussion about payment as an internet operating system play integrating with social networking; Sarah Milstein picks up the thread even more closely here on Radar, focusing on the idea I proposed of eBay's trust and identity metrics as a web service; Valleywag picks up on Jesse's line, "You become what you disrupt."

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