eBay has launched yet another official site aiming to bring together all the corporate information on eBay Inc. eBayInc.com combines much of the information that was previously rather hidden on the eBay.com site, such as press releases, job openings and investor information. It also has “eBay Connect”, an aggregator for all the other content that eBay’s putting out across its plethora of blogs, which has a slightly cute feature allowing readers to filter for just Marketplace news, just PayPal news or just corporate news.
Is this just what the eBay-watching world has been waiting for? Pierre Omidyar’s comment on Twitter has an air of “at last” about it, and eBay Ink writes
believe it or not, there has never been an official corporate website that represents the corporate information regarding eBay Inc. and all of the people and businesses behind it.
Well, maybe. There have been a number of disparate bits of site – About eBay, press office, investor news and so on – which are targetted very specifically, and very well, at different groups of readers. There have been a lot of blogs, some of which have great content and some of which (eBay UK’s Trust and Safety blog, I’m looking at you) never managed more than a couple of posts. It’s just never been all collected together quite so visibly.
eBayInc.com crucially doesn’t promise any new content, only a new platform to collect everything that’s already out there. Right now, it’s hard to see the point. This is a broadcast site: it’s all about what eBay want to tell us, not what we want to talk to eBay about. It doesn’t promise any new accessibility, any new conversation, any new openness: it’s just another place to read the same old same old from eBay PR. If you’re interested in this stuff, you’re already reading it: and if you’re not, eBayInc.com doesn’t bring anything new to the table.
But maybe the point comes later: eBay’s official social media guru Richard Brewer-Hay writes:
…please let us know what you’d like to see added – what do you like most about it? Least? This is by no means a final product, it’s a launching pad for us to communicate and interact on a higher level as a company of individuals and I look forward to enhancing and expanding on this platform over the coming months.
If you don’t want to pop over to eBay Ink and leave an opinion, feel free to leave a comment here. 😉
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