Students Embarrass eBay With Firefox Add-On 269
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."
Makes sense of this slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense of this slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense of this slogan (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Makes sense of this slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense of this slogan (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Makes sense of this slogan (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is the way the web is ment to work in the first place. What gets displayed and how it is displayed being entirely down to the browser, all the site can do is ask the browser nicely to render a certain way.
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Re:Makes sense of this slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
so, are you ready to pay for content? cause its either adds that pay, or you pay for content. Someone has to.
Personally, I have no problems with ads as long as they are static and stay at the top of the page. If it's for a product I'm interested I'll even open the referenced link in another browser tab to get more information, and perhaps even buy it. But any ads that blinks, moves, or pops up gets immediately blocked if it somehow gets around NoScript and Adblock. Content providers know that those types of ads are not only irritating but waste users resources and time as well so should not be surprised when they are treated in kind.
All well and good, but... (Score:3, Funny)
But only Internet Explorer can hold back the Web.
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The last word didn't make it through, so let me add it for you.
Re:Makes sense of this slogan (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry but TFS is just wrong. Paypal is their main source of revenue. Believe me, double dipping by charging both sellers and buyers a fee to use the service is very lucrative.
Nice. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nice. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Excepting of course that the free market is a harsh mistress and in an idealized environment does not tolerate large profit margins. If there are large profit margins it means that a competitor should start up with lower profits. Absent such natural checks and balances capitalism would be a disaster for most people. Unfortunately frequently the checks and balances aren't actually present. The free market isn't ideal: Consumers aren't entirely rational, information is frequently withheld, participants commit fraud, governments meddle, and sometimes natural monopolies form. When the market is distorted in such a way, one can no longer reasonably hold that the prices are necessarily reasonable and should be accepted without question.
eBay might be such an example. Thanks to the network effect, eBay is enjoying a very natural monopoly. If a seller jumps to another service, they look 90% or more of their potential buyers, dramatically reducing effective demand for their product and lowering their own profits. As a result the sellers generally don't leave. Given so few sellers, buyers have little incentive to jump services, creating a feedback loop.
Given this overwhelming cost to jumping services, there is no realistic competition. Absent competition, eBay can afford to jack prices and generate large profit margins with no real risk.
I don't know if eBay really is gouging, if regulation (the typical solution) is needed, and if so what sort of regulation we should enact, but it is definitely within the realm of possibility. You can't simply wave around supply-and-demand like it's a magical wand that magically makes everything good.
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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 use
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, you don't need a large house for your family, you could live in a trailer. They're not so bad now, with water and electricity hookups and whatnot. Also, you don't need to eat fresh food every day. A 50 pound bag of rice lasts quite a while and costs very little. Spice it up with whatever is cheapest in the veggie department, and some kind of beans for protein.
You can cut your electricity by getting rid of your computer, and you'll save on ISP costs too. Thrift stores have all the almost recent styles at a fraction of the price of the department stores, sometimes charging by the pound rather than the item.
Oh you don't? They why do you begrudge Ebay charging what they're worth?
Of course, the irony of this rant is that I actually despise Ebay's pricing scheme, and I often consider the question of "What have Ebay done to earn that money." Specifically in regards to their habit of charging per dollar won rather than per page viewed.
Since the final price of an item has more to do with the item than ebay's efforts on its behalf, It's absurd that they are paid based on the final price. The absurdity however is not that Ebay seeks such ridiculous compensation, but that any competitor which proposes a saner pricing scheme (for instance, bandwidth, page placement, size, etc.) for what is basically a national classified ad-system with fulfillment tracking will need exceptionally deep pockets just to get off the ground due to the nature of the online auction industry and the network effect.
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah.
What something is "worth" is what somebody is willing to pay. No more, no less.
Absent some meaningfull competition, you're paying what ebay demands, not what it's worth.
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Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a business allows them to charge more for no reason. Don't like it? Don't use them.
I don't know why people feel that companies have to justify price increases with some rationale of higher costs for them. Companies do that to make purchasers feel better, but the truth of the matter is that companies (regulated industries aside) can charge whatever the hell they feel like for what they provide. EBay is not in business to make $x profit per transaction; they are in business to maximize $x.
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're allowed to charge whatever they feel like in much the same way that I'm allowed to be a total asshole. Yeah, it's allowed in a free society, but that doesn't make it good or smart.
Trying to maximize profits at the detriment of your own customers is common practice, and that's largely why so many things are completely screwed up. The world would be better if people were willing to settle for an honest buck, a modest profit, instead of screwing over everyone as far as they're allowed with no consideration for the ramifications.
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Well, that's a debate about capitalism. Some would argue that your system is inefficient, and would therefore not make best use of resources, and would therefor
Re:Nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's a debate about capitalism. Some would argue that your system is inefficient, and would therefore not make best use of resources, and would therefore result in less for everyone.
That's not the debate about capitalism-- my "system" isn't a system. Capitalism is a system of economic freedom, but "economic freedom" does not require that you adopt ruthless unethical business practices any more than personal freedom requires people to be assholes. It gives you the freedom to do so, but that freedom is not a moral imperative to act viciously.
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Care to prove that assertion? I've always found that part of the libertarian creed to be baseless.
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Business charge prices for profit and to discourage behavior.
Given very cheap prices, ebay could run into the tragedy of the commons where their bandwidth is overwhelmed in some unplanned, unintended way.
At the heart of it tho- all businesses take something that was a good deal, and then they turn the profit screws until it actually becomes unpleasant to deal with them because of ads, prices, etc. It's called "yield management" and it amounts to firing or r
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If it's truly impossible to quantify them, then how do you know they're undervalued? Maybe they're overvalued. Maybe they're valued exactly correctly. Maybe they're never valued exactly correctly, but on average they're about right (this is what I suspect is closest to the truth).
Seriously, with a small or even medium-sized business there
you forgot something (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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First, God bless capitalism!
Second, dude, it's market driven. There are alternatives. If eBay can get away with charging those prices, and still continue to grow, more power to them. That is what business is all about.
Third, God bless capitalism!
Oh, and before I forget...
Forth, the world's biggest horses ass is dead, let's hoist one to God for finally killing Jerry Falwell. Yay, God. Now, God, what can you do about Pa
Selling ad space (Score:2, Interesting)
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 i
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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 wit
And then eBay said.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Embarrass? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't making the plugin. That's relatively easy. I guarentee is doesn't take eBay very long to make a toolbar for their own site, assuming they have programmers that are a least a bit competent.
No, the problem is testing. If an offical toolbar from eBay causes even the smallest problem, eBay is on the hook. For a bunch of students this isn't a problem.
*Was* the problem testing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Was* the problem testing? (Score:5, Insightful)
And then after that there's the issue of making it release-quality, which is more important for a company with a reputation than a bunch of students.
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Re:Embarrass? (Score:5, Insightful)
I uninstalled and will begin looking for something similar which supports users outside the US.
On a side note, has it really taken this long for somebody to realise that an eBay toolbar might be a good idea??
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No, it probably just took this long for someone to find a way to do it without some small slip up that they could have been sued to death over because of the US's position on IP laws.
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So, how many people (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Great, I'll just tell grandma to follow this simple procedure to make sure the emails she's getting arent phishing attempts. She's going to be so happy now that she can install toolbars. Just open the XPI, make sure you're not using XPCOM, a
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Yeah, I felt the same way about ActiveX binaries. But just a little bit more time than verifying that it doesn't use XPCOM and look in the XPI (which everyone knows is a ZIP anyway) and look at the JS, ZUL and RDF. Yeah.
Got any more recommendations I might want to pass on to aunt Tilly and cousin Joe Bob when they ask me about Firefox?
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How can your aunt Tilly and cousin Joe Bob trust ANY software at all? They probably didn't build it.
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Furthermore, we can say that that XPI has not become such a problem (since you're vulnerable through it as well) simply because it hasn't reached a large enough segment of the PC user base. Correct?
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As far as assuming
Money, Money, Money (Score:5, Insightful)
That is why Ebay have not finished their own toolbar yet. They were too busy trying to figure out how to code the bar without messing up their revenue streams. Had they have just made the bar functional and user friendly, they might have already finished it. Fortunately for everyone else, the Stanford group was only concerned about a functional, working toolbar.
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The "free" market isn't completely faultless.
EBay was Late Because... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:EBay was Late Because... (Score:4, Funny)
Toolbar looks cool and all... (Score:5, Funny)
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Be careful, rumor has it Microsoft has patented revealing how many Microsoft-patents something violates.
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Read the Heartwarming story... (Score:5, Funny)
DMCA notice (Score:4, Funny)
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So I would imagine that the toolbar by NOT displaying some portions of the website is not breaking any laws (its the same as having Adblock Plus on I imagine). Of course the only point of contention could be the 'see preview image regardless if seller payed for it or not' part could be the only portion that is even remotely DMCA-able. In which case they remove that minor bit of functio
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Umm... has anyone actually tried this?? I downloaded the toolbar and now I can't see any item preview images in Firefox!! Maybe eBay is blocking it already?
Cool. Not surprising, but cool. (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple guys who want to do something they think is cool turned out to be faster at it than a couple corporations trying to do something to monetize what they perceive as something users want.
Let me put on my surprised face.
Well.... (Score:2)
True, very true, but if the exec's hadn't been sitting around with their "thumbs up thier as^H^HeBays"
and released *something*, then they would not have had thier thunder^Wbirds stolen.
(ok, ok, put the pointy stick down, I'll stop!)
Quote source? (Score:2, Informative)
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It's not a quote. It's an anecdote. Do you see it in quotation marks? But it would be nice to know where it came from. Probably the submitter just forgot to insert a link.
"Ignore" sellers? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd very much like an "ignore" option.
Re:"Ignore" sellers? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Ignore" sellers? (Score:5, Insightful)
And I give good feedback when the transaction sucked and I'm a buyer because no seller leaves feedback until the buyer does. It's blackmail. I paid you within 30 seconds of the close of the auction. You should give me feedback then, the transaction is done, as far as you are concerned. But no, I don't get any feedback until I've left feedback. If the damn thing takes 6 weeks to get here, I have the choice of telling the world that the transaction sucked (and I get negative retaliatory feedback when I've done nothing wrong), or I give good feedback or no feedback to protect my own feedback ratio.
eBay purposefully slants such things toward the seller, because those are the people that pay the fees. eBay could come up with all sorts of ways to prevent retaliation. If I'm a buyer, I've paid (verified by my paypal account that eBay saw the payment flow through) then the seller can't give me negative/neutral feedback once I give feedback. If I did something wrong, they'll know it long before the item arrives at my house. To accept my payment and wait to see what I leave for feedback before leaving their own is blackmail and makes the feedback system mostly useless.
Re:"Ignore" sellers? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, I am in favor of not showing either party the feedback that the other user left until they have both left it. That would almost completely eliminate retaliatory feedback.
PS: I am a seller, and I actually do leave positive feedback as soon as the (proper) payment arrives.
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The obvious thing to do would be to never leave feedback then if you didn't want negative feedback to affect you.
Perhaps they should require the "feedback transaction" to complete before the seller puts up any more items, or something similar.
Re:"Ignore" sellers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's hoping the new feedback system helps everybody.
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If you communicate well, pack well, ship promptly and take responsibility when the item doesn't arrive or arrives damaged, its pretty easy to stay over 99%. Screw up one of those areas and you'll rapidly drop below it.
eBay isn't Best Buy. I expect better service from the eBay sellers I deal with than I get at Best Buy. By setting my cutoff at 99%, I get that service.
And anyway, what's your problem? If you're a ninety-eight percenter, I won't buy from you wheth
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Inevitable problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Inevitable problems (Score:5, Insightful)
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You mean the "hundreds of people with programming skills" who comprise open source community that forks projects at the drop of a hat because they can't check their egos at the door and work to make quality products TOGETHER? Some do, to be sure, but consider examples including the KDE vs GNOME vs every other window manager debate, the Firefox vs Iceweasel crap, and so forth... lots of projects that functionally do the
More than embarrassment (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds kind of like DRM CDs vs. digital format music. You don't have to be a lawyer to figure out if the customer prefers better functionality. Let's hope eBay takes a different approach than the recording industry has. I'm not optimistic.
PFffffffffft (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Market research (Score:5, Insightful)
1. eBay has great brand awareness. People know about it, and the opinion is generally positive. Hell, it can't be too negative if a bunch of programmer (lazy) students (even lazier) are writing software on their time to access eBay features.
2. Users LOATHE ads. This should be obvious. Is it just me, or are advertisements starting to have a reverse effect? You see an advertisement or commercial spot, and suddenly you're pissed off at the company in question for ramming advertising down your throat and find yourself not wanting to buy whatever they're selling, even if you need it.
3. eBay's "gallery" view stuff hurts the overall user experience. I understand they want to make more money, but the fact that one of the first things these programmers bypassed is the gallery exclusion garbage is very telling. People don't want to click through even 1 or 2 things to see a picture of an item. They want to see it immediately, particularly those who haven't the foggiest about web design, image hosting, or listing fees. That group most likely has no idea why there's so much inconsistency between item listings on eBay, and it's a matter of confusion on an already intimidating (to a new user) website.
It should also tell eBay something about itself. eBay has been around for something like 11 years, Firefox for 5 or 6, and it's been quite popular for the last couple of years (read: other big companies have been producing toolbars for Firefox without much problem). Why did this even have to happen? Get with it eBay...
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Exactly. If I'm considering two items that are otherwise the same I consider their advertising. If I can remember seeing an ad for one of the products, I buy the othe
Where's the Toolbar? (Score:2)
Re:Where's the Toolbar? (Score:4, Informative)
damn students (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait...
Oh no, we're embarassed (Score:3, Insightful)
Goes to show (Score:5, Insightful)
Free software gives you what you want to have.
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Software that you have built to spec gives you what you want to have. Give or take some bugs and design errors.
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The problem is in today's world that you don't "order" software. Few companies and nearly no privat person can afford that. You buy it off the shelf. And that software, by its very nature, does what its maker wants it to do. This can (and should) of course be what the maker thinks the user could use. Which can be right or wrong.
In today's world, with vendor lock-in becom
Two letters come to mind when reading .. (Score:3, Funny)
Mozilla not embarrassed? (Score:2)
Oh wait, I'm not.
fees? What does that have to do with the Toolbar? (Score:2, Informative)
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How did this get modded up? The toolbar modifies the pages, it doesn't show you a different page.
Also, they actually DO have a beta release of their toolbar now, so the same objection would apply to their toolbar.
Re:ToS violation, not DCMA (Score:5, Informative)
Violation of ToS =! Theft. Say that over and over again until you get that absurd idea out of your head.
If they want to block access from the toolbar (probably impossible since the processing is done on the end-user's computer), let them go ahead. But the end user is under no obligation to stop using said toolbar.
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I honestly laugh when I read stuff like that. Virtually every study, whether ad industry, anti-ad industry or third party neutral has found that the average consumer has no problem what-so-ever with ads and commercials. In fact, they love them. What's more, many are excited about new technologies which pitch them products that they actually want.
Feel free to enjoy your Ad Busters subscription but the rest of the worl