Students Embarrass eBay With Firefox Add-On

An anonymous reader sends along a posting from the Grooveking blog on a group of Stanford students who got together to help promote Firefox and ended up releasing a long overdue eBay Toolbar for Firefox before Mozilla and eBay could release their jointly developed extension in Europe. Mozilla's COO said the preemptive release of the eBay Toolbar had ruffled some feathers among European eBay execs. "Besides basic search features, it removes external ads on the site and allows users to see thumbnail pictures on ALL search items, even those sellers didn't pay for. An eBay toolbar has been long overdue... eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal."

Nice.

[silentsentinel]

Suck it, Ebay. Stop trying to hamstring your sellers. Your costs were exponentially lower when you were born, making more money doesn't entitle you to start charging more money for no real reason.

Ebay

[jrwr00]

Well then they are ether going to have to change there site code or talk to the students to get those ads back or something.... EBay shame on you for not releasing you own toolbar so this didnt happen

So, how many people

[Rogerborg]

Just installed it and started typing in their personal information, with absolutely no idea what this plugin was doing with it?

Uh huh. Oh, now you're thinking through the security implications.

It's probably not a particularly clever piece of phishing, but the next one might be.

"Ignore" sellers?

[Spazmania]

Does it let me "ignore" sellers by name, feedback ratio and feedback quantity so I never see their listings? If it does, I'll download it right now. There are half a dozen or so "power sellers" who flood the search terms I regularly look for with auctions I wouldn't bid on in a million years. And then there are all the 98.2% positive feedback guys who I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole (99% is my normal cutoff) and all the obviously re-registered accounts that are too slick to legitimately have only 8 feedbacks.

I'd very much like an "ignore" option.

Inevitable problems

[MM_LONEWOLF]

Here's the problem. Intelligent people with decent coding knowledge created a free piece of software that sounds pretty good. Ebay appearantly doesn't want them to use it, and started raising a ruckus. But what happens when hundreds of people with programming skills start doing things like this, especially if computer programming becomes part of high school curriculum? ( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/142 0238 [slashdot.org] ) One day, the flood will hit, Ebay, Microsoft, Apple, and everything else will collapse, and the Open Source Community will rejoice.

Re:"Ignore" sellers?

[oo]

98.2% positive feedback? What's wrong with that? You do realize that that's less than 4 negatives for 200 transactions? It's so easy to end up with retaliatory negatives from sellers when you use your account for both buying and selling.

Don't be a chickenshit. And for fuck's sake don't leave negative retaliatory feedback when I give you a neutral. The ebay feedback system is so broken that people like you think a single negative and fifty positives is a complete disaster. It definitely needs more granularity.

PFffffffffft

[multipartmixed]

Wanna know what's probably happening at eBay right now?

Hello? Dev team? When will the toolbar be ready? Really? Six weeks? I think not. Ship in 3 or you're fired. Click.

Hello? Systems D00ds / Web Devs? Put the security enhancements on hold. You have three weeks to figure out how to break the Stanford tool bar; the sooner the better. And then roll out the changes with some new eye-candy so we don't look like asses.

you forgot something

[nanosquid]

That should be: "Don't like it? Don't use them, tell others not to use them, and explain why you don't like them."

I don't know why people feel that companies have to justify price increases with some rationale of higher costs for them.

Because price and cost carries information about a company. If a company charges substantially more than cost, you know that you can probably find a better deal elsewhere. If you can't, then there may be a monopoly involved.

Re:Nice.

[maxume]

You're over reading my comment. I personally don't see their offering as particularly valuable(I've never even actually used it, I think that's a market statement right?). The point isn't that they don't get to raise prices if they damn well please, the point is that I don't think that the market will bear much higher prices, because all they really offer is a slightly higher probability of sale than a smaller auction site, and a crappy and abused reputation system.

All very well, but a long way from home!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... There's no way to tell this toolbar that you don't live in the USA and that you'd like to use a local ebay site. So much for ebay users in Australia, India, Canada, the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, etc.
But wait, that's only about 6 users, isn't it? (Pity I'm one of them.)

Selling ad space

[zaphod_es]

On /. a lot of generalities are stated in the limited context of the internet or computers generally. In fact intrusive advertising is all over the interweb which is no different from the real world.

I am not opposed to advertising and accept that a service has to be paid for one way or another. Whether the content provider is a TV station, free newspaper or an internet service the game is pretty well the same thing. On the other hand I am becoming increasingly pissed off by advertising covering every inch of space. Buses, bus stops, bus tickets, phone booths, serviettes, gas stations, walls buildings, parking meters, toilets ... the internet ...the list is endless.

Of course the solution is in our own hands. If we don't like what eBay does we can stop going there; they will soon react if enough customers vote with their feet. I have almost stopped watching TV as the ads have become so intrusive that the programs are no longer worth watching. Heck, I have even stopped using porn sites for the same reasons!

Plugins like the one under discussion are a short term solution. In the longer term eBay will find a way of blocking them, no doubt motivating someone to try something else. The real solution lies with us, the consumers, and until we stop behaving like sheep we will have to learn to live with in your face ads.

Re:Selling ad space

[dobestpossible]

Off topic of eBay and the plug-in for Firefox I just installed, I wish to comment on advertisements.
  Just as zaphod_es (613312) has stopped watching television, I too had quit and sold my tv in 1997 when I was a teenager because of the lousy sitcoms and excessive number of minutes spent on ads compared to entertainment. People should be able to avoid the ugliness of these ads, if the product was worth a damn, people will get word of it. Everyone knows McDonald's exists, yet they bombard us daily with their latest (and very retarded) slogans and pictures of food that look nothing like the real product (which also lacks good taste).
  I have found that Ad-Block Plus and Flash Block add-ins for FireFox makes browsing the web MUCH more enjoyable and pages load faster. If developers did not make software that limits the ads, I would be a very pissed off internet user. I replaced my tv with computer, but have no alternative to replace computer.

Re:Makes sense of this slogan

[Trails]

I am perfectly happy to have eBay send ad content to my computer. I'm also perfectly happy to have my computer ignore that content. Their markup interpreted by my computer. Showing me adds never made them any money to begin with, so skipping them doesn't hurt anyone.

Re:"Ignore" sellers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should be the feedback shown to anyone before both parties have gave feedback? Actually, the obvious reason is that if someone is about to deliberately bullshit other party, he will not leave feedback at all, thus preventing the feedback on himself be shown.

One scheme to negate this is by using a deadline for feedbacks so that the feedback is not shown before the deadline IF both parties have not given feedback. If only one party has given feedback by the deadline, it is then shown after deadline but the other party cannot give feedback at all because the deadline has been already met. If both sides give feedback before the deadline, then the feedback is shown right away.

Re:Nice.

[cgenman]

No, but throughout the majority of the world (even China is adopting it), supply and demand does. If the demand for ebay's services increases, why shouldn't they be able to match demand with an increase in price?

Why, then, should ebay be able to require that people see their advertisements?

eBay has been very close to violating certain unspoken social contracts, mostly around their listing cuts and near-monopoly status. And if they start treating their users badly but in a legal way, why shouldn't their users treat them in kind?