WebProNews » Oodle

ForRent.com Partners With Oodle On Facebook Marketplace

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:50:37 +0000

ForRent.com said today it has partnered with online classified company Oodle to integrate its apartment listings in the Facebook Marketplace.

“Looking for and acquiring a home (be it renting or buying) has been called one of life’s major stressors. Engaging feedback from one’s ‘social network’ can ease the anxiety of this decision,” said Brock MacLean, senior vice president of national sales and development at ForRent.com.

Our partnership with Oodle provides a human element to our customers’ listings and brings a trust factor to the rental process, since users can see how their friends and friends of friends are connected to listings, ask questions, receive feedback, make comments and respond to listings.”

ForRent.com says Marketplace generates leads through conversations via comments and messaging.

Oodle says its Marketplace on Facebook and its site has more than 14 million unique monthly users.

“Over the last few years the Internet has evolved – it’s become more social,” said Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle.

“It’s critical for businesses to understand the importance of this change as they market themselves online. This is particularly important in the multi-family industry, where consumers enlist their friends in the process of figuring out where to live.”

Bing Launches Maps Apps for World Tour, Oodle, Foursquare

Chris Crum — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:45:46 +0000

Microsoft launched a few new apps for Bing Maps today: the World Tour App, the Oodle App and the Foursquare App.

"Just about every month, Bing Maps gets a makeover in the form of new map imagery for locations worldwide," a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. "The World Tour map app brings these updates to life using the Bing Map Apps framework, Silverlight and Azure."

"Oodle.com, one of the fastest growing classifieds services is creating an app that will map rental housing on Bing Maps which will be available today," he says. "The Oodle Rentals app will pull-in Oodle data, allowing users to look at various rental housing available from Oodle.com."

"Last week at SES New York, we announced our partnership with foursquare and plans to roll out the foursquare Everywhere app on Bing Maps in the coming weeks," he notes. "Today, the app will be live and ready for use."

That’s not all Microsoft announced for Bing at SES. They also announced an update to the Bing user interface, which adapts the page and search results based on the intent of the query.

"We’ll be testing a new user interface that includes new design concepts that move the Quick Tabs functionality to the top of the screen, so customers see a more visual and organized page," the company said.

They also announced a new search experience for autos. For more info on these updates, watch our coverage of Microsoft’s SES keynote and our exclusive interview with Bing Director Stefan Weitz.

Facebook Marketplace Goes Live With Oodle

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:14:43 +0000

Facebook Marketplace has relaunched and is now powered by online classified service Oodle.

Facebook first launched its Marketplace application in May of 2007 as a way for users to create, share and respond to listings across categories such as "Furniture" and "Roommates."

"Marketplace helps people buy and sell furniture and household items in a trusted environment," wrote Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle, on the Facebook Blog.

"Late last year, Facebook turned to Oodle for its expertise in online classifieds, and Oodle has built an entirely new version of Marketplace focused on giving people a place to buy, sell or give things away to the people they know."

Users who already had the Marketplace application installed will still be able to see it bookmarked on the Applications tab in the lower left hand corner of their screen. Users who have a live listing will have the option to transfer it to the new Facebook Marketplace.

Facebook Marketplace also has a new feature called Sell for a Cause, which allows users to donate profits from items they sell to more than a million charities.

"Turning the development and management of Marketplace over to an innovator in online classifieds will give users more advanced ways to create and share listings on Facebook," said Ethan Beard, director of business development at Facebook.

"We’re excited by the potential of the Oodle powered Marketplace application to offer an engaging classifieds experience on Facebook."

Oodle Scores MySpace Classifieds Deal

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:06:13 +0000

No Craigslist or Kijiji for Rupert Murdoch’s social networking outpost, MySpace; it’s Oodle that landed the agreement to make over the classified section on the site.

Classifieds site Oodle notched a big win for its services. Their online classifieds snared a big customer – Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace.

Oodle CEO Craig Donato blogged about the change, which opened today to the oodles of visitors to MySpace:

The site is also more social: listings are linked to MySpace profiles – not anonymous IDs, and users can enlist their friends to help them buy or sell through MySpace bulletins and blogs.

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Kijiji Attempts to Take On Craigslist

Andrew Goodman — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:14:25 +0000

The New York Times recently reported a story about Kijiji’s attempt to take on Craigslist. Though Kijiji has some decent traction globally, it had been an unknown in the US. Is that about to change?

One factor in recent growth mentioned in the article was campaigns by eBay to inform users of Kijiji’s presence. But what about the old tried and true – the organic search referrals that did so much to help Craigslist over the years? I figured Kijiji would look pretty strong on this front, because I’ve noticed their prominent placement on many local search queries here in Canada, in spite of their strong competition from, among others, Craigslist and Livedeal.

So I turned to my friends at Hitwise, and they nicely supplied the following snapshot of Kijiji’s rapid growth in organic search referrals – technically they refer to this as "downstream traffic from the search engines category, as a percentage of all search engine referral traffic" – so literally, this is their share of the overall pie of available search referrals from Google, Yahoo, etc.:

Nice-looking growth – so are they going to knock Craigslist’s block off? No time soon. Look at the comparison chart – the charting software nicely equates Kijiji’s relatively tiny referral traffic to zero:

Finally, we looked at Kijiji’s search referrals against Oodle’s (thanks to Greg Sterling for reminding me of Oodle’s existence):

This shows Oodle kicking kijiji’s butt. I’m still checking on whether this reflects paid clicks as well as organic.

Kijiji faces a not-insurmountable chicken-egg problem. Nothing says their search referrals can’t go up 10X this year as their relatively new site gains more quality signals with Google’s algorithm. But breaking through looks like it will be a formidable challenge – more so in the US, where Craigslist is established, than globally.

Regardless of what happens, eBay will be OK. They own stakes in both Kijiji and Craigslist.

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Oodle Grabs New York Post Deal

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:28:51 +0000

The online classifieds at Rupert Murdoch’s Big Apple tabloid are getting a makeover, in an impressive little win for Oodle.

Score a point in the column for Oodle. They have announced a deal with the New York Post that will bring Oodle’s touch to the Post’s classifieds.

"New York Post users will now be able to search New York’s largest collection of online classified listings in tickets, pets, merchandise and services as well as post their own ads for free," Oodle said in its announcement. Oodle’s services are live on the Post’s site today.

The jobs section will remain with the Post’s current job classifieds provider, Adicio. Neither Oodle nor Yahoo’s HotJobs and its consortium of newspapers have managed to win over Murdoch’s Post for those lucrative listings.

Oodle recently revamped its site, and launched "Oodle 2.0" in November 2007. The site touted the addition of 500,000 new listings each day, and over 30 million listings aggregated from 80,000 sites.

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Oodle Shakes Its BandTracker

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 23:21:21 +0000

Online classifieds site Oodle has launched a concert listings service called BandTracker out of beta. If a favorite band plays near you, BandTracker will let you know.

Oodle Shakes Its BandTracker

Ah, to be young again, with a talent for music and a do-it-yourself ethic that web service developers seem eager to complement with their creations. Sadly, people who work in banks and such tend to notice when you decide being the new Midnight Oil is more important to your soul than paying the bills.

For those who are encumbered by dreams, talent, and a persistent nature, the Internet has become the conduit for creative control. It’s giving a lot to fans, as the freshly unleashed BandTracker from Oodle demonstrates.

BandTracker does what its name indicates. If a tracked band has a show near you, BandTracker emails you a notification. They have over 333,000 bands in their database, and over 714,000 shows.

If BandTracker has missed a show that you know should be listed, you can email the update to them for addition to the database.

When you find your band has a date scheduled, say the Los Lonely Boys show at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles this Friday, you can connect to tickets for sale via BandTracker’s parent, Oodle. Searching for those LLB tickets found ducats for sale from StubHub and Ticket Solutions among their listings.

Widget fans can grab a couple of BandTracker gadgets for their sites, blogs, or MySpace profiles. The ‘My BandTracker’ widget shows your custom calendar of favorite bands, while the ‘Band Promoter’ widget lets you promote your group to site visitors.

All you need is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth. And some cool online tools.

The Month of Acquisitions

Manoj Jasra — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:46:04 +0000

There were numerous partnerships and acquisitions in the month of May, which included a lot of dollars changing hands. Let’s look at some of the major deals that went down this past month

Ebay Purchases StumbleUpon for $75 million

FeedBurner Sold! for $100 million to Google

Google Buys Panoramio, Photo Mapping Software

Fox Interactive Media (NWS) Acquires Photobucket and Flektor

Google buys GreenBorder Technologies for more security in Google Apps

Microsoft buys aQuantive Inc, for 6 billion US dollars

CBS buys Last.fm

AOL Buys Mobile Ad Network

Microsoft Buys CareerBuilder; Google Interested In SimplyHired

AOL Buys German Ad Server Adtech

Yahoo Fully Acquires Right Media (April 30th)

Facebook Partners with Oodle for Classifieds

Google and Microsoft seem to be positioning themselves strategically in order to keep up with each other in the war for Internet dominance. I expect to see this trend of acquisitions continuing strong into the summer.

Do leave a comment if I have missed any major partnerships or purchases.

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What Happened to Oodle?

Andy Beal — Mon, 14 May 2007 19:23:21 +0000

Just days after Facebook announced a partnership with online classifieds aggregator, Oodle, the social networking site has rolled-out a seemingly different classified solution.

Facebook’s new “Marketplace” takes a lot of cues from popular classifieds site, Craigslist, and CNET took it for a test drive.

When you post a listing, you first have to select whether you’re listing something or listing that you want something. Then, within that, you can select a category (items for sale, housing, jobs, everything else) and a sub-category within that category. In the “For Sale” category, for example, it’s divided into college-student-friendly sub-categories of books, tickets, electronics, furniture, and everything else. You can add multiple photos, too.

Image via CNET

What’s weird is there is no category for dating, neither is there one for giving away free stuff. I thought both would be high-up the priority list for the students that make up the bulk of Facebook users.

So, what’s up with Oodle? Did Facebook change their mind? Are the two services different? I know the Oodle team read this blog, so perhaps they’ll comment. In the meantime, anyone care to speculate what’s going on?

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Oodle Tracking Pricing Data for Online Classifieds

Andy Beal — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:13:35 +0000

Oodle will today announce the launch of the Oodle Index, a real-time pricing guide for online classified listings.

When Oodle launched back in April of 2005, their goal was to consolidate the widely scattered classifieds space and provide users with a central location for searching and shopping for online classifieds. Almost two years later, Oodle has collected data from hundreds of millions of online listings and has launched the Oodle Index as a means to help shoppers better understand pricing trends and find those hidden classifieds bargains.

I had a chance to speak to Oodle CEO and founder, Craig Donato, earlier this week and he walked me through the various features the Oodle Index will offer at launch. Hoping to become the “Kelly Blue Book of Classifieds”, the Oodle Index will be integrated with Oodle’s search results and utilized by clicking the “Pricing” link. Users will have access to some neat interactive charts which will show pricing and inventory trends, tailored to their geographic location.

By clicking on the pricing charts, users will be able to instantly view listings available in a specific price range and get real time data on availability. For example, searching for a 2004 Honda Accord, with less than 30,000 miles on the clock, shows 281 listings in the New York area, with an average price of $18,205. Using the Oodle Index charts, users making this search will see that for an average of just $300 more, they can peruse more than 180 Accords built in 2005. It’s this type of transparency in the online classifieds space that Oodle is hoping to bring with the Oodle Index.

“Pricing in classifieds is very inefficient,” says Craig Donato. “Our vision is to be the shopping tool for classifieds.” Indeed, Oodle has access to a multitude of data points, including demographics of buyers – even able to understand car buying preferences of Republicans in California compared to Democrats in New England.

The Oodle Index is available in all geographic areas served by Oodle and will initially provide pricing data for cars, real estate and apartment rentals.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.