eBay is rolling a new feature on their site called eBay My World (or at least I think it is new since I haven’t seen this in the past). You can check out my eBay My World page to get a sense of all the functionality they are pulling into one single page including Feedback Ratings, eBay listings, eBay blog posts, and biographical information.
I am not sure how all of this will work out for eBay, but I have to give them some nice credit. They certainly are focusing on the community-building tools lately with the blogs and wikis as just two prominent examples. I wonder how much control the Trust & Safety department will exert over these parts of the eBay site. Their natural reaction is going to be to monitor the blogs and wikis pretty carefully for threats and "bad" things, but I am not sure that is going to fly very well on blogs and wikis. If there is too much Big Brother, these features simply won’t get traction because it is too easy to simply jump over to SixApart‘s Vox to set up something that is at least as good as these tools.
Speaking of which, if you haven’t yet checked out Vox, you should. Very cool blogging site with lots of great social networking tools. It is perfect for the non-tech blogger. Scott Kraft, a good friend and important advisor to buySAFE, is SixApart’s new CMO, and based on what I can see, he is doing an amazing job so far.