OK, that may be overly dramatic, but this interesting TechCrunch post by Slide exec Keith Rabois, talks about how people started spending their time online elsewhere, as eBay became less fun, and other sites moreso.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/23/how-facebook-myspace-and-youtube-killed-ebay/
One thing that stood out for me in the post was how at one point around the PayPal purchase time, eBay had "the leading actors of most of this entertainment revolution sitting in
its offices. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube fame, Peter Thiel
(Facebook), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Max Levchin (Slide), David Sacks
(Geni and Yammer), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, board member of Zynga) and
others, myself included, were all too alienated by eBay�s bureaucratic
and political MBA culture. So we decided to create our own fun
elsewhere instead."
I have thought for a while that the fun factor has been missing from eBay. And what happened to the wacky little bidder avatars we were going to see? Maybe there will be some announcements from this June's eBay DevCon that will shine a ray of hope.
Well, it's still fun for me when something sells, but the serious business of being a seller, with all its responsibility and pressure to please completely less the scarlet "F" for bad feedback be posted on the public square for all of ecommerce to see, takes a lot of the warm 'n' fuzzies out of it. I hope eBay management does some things to put mroe fun back in.
