I received the latest Windows Expo Live newsletter from Microsoft this week. It doesn’t make me want to jump up and place listings on their site, in fact it concentrates on what they consider to be “fun”, but which in reality is just bizarre!
We thought we’d kick it off with a funny listing by Expo user Scottrefun. We’re excited that Expo is growing partly because we get to see more listings like that one, and include our own life observations.
So that’s the fun stuff out of the way – what about the serious stuff? Well firstly I’m pleased to see that they have decided to implement PayPal in preference to Google Checkout. Hardly a surprising choice – the owners of MSN were hardly likely to put another search engines payment system in place and that’s without all the reported problems with Checkout.
So, what have we been up to? Check these out: a new site design, comments on listings, the ability to send and receive payment with PayPal, featured listings, and over 300,000 new job listings, woah… And those are just the major updates! We also tightened up some little stuff and increased security through greater fraud detection. If you haven’t noticed, go ahead and take a look!
It’s interesting to note that they’re working on fraud detection, security has always been a complaint with Microsoft products and problems in this area are the last thing they need.
All in all not particularly impressive, emphasis is on the community aspects of the site, and they haven’t even managed to realise I have a UK registration but send me a US version of the email. Navigating from the US to the UK site isn’t immediately obvious although clicking “home” does the trick.
I don’t think eBay will be having sleepless nights just yet.
