June 14th, 2007
Image Gallery: eBay-to-go comes in a box (that goes on your blog, MySpace, etc.)
This week, at the eBay Developer Conference in Boston, one of the company’s developers Stephen Chang was demonstrating a new easy-to-customize software widget called eBay-to-go that webmasters, bloggers and users of other social sites like MySpace can use to embed a small portal into the eBay auction system right onto their Web pages. Embedded below is an example of a widget that I customized to search for Zipp Wheels (a type of aerodynamic wheel for bicycles):
As shown in our ZDNet image gallery, the widget can be programmed to search eBay using a particular search string (returning the results as a series of clickable images like the widget above). Or, it can be programmed to look at a single item. This would be good if you had a blog where you wanted to write more about the things that you had for sale and offer your readers a direct link to the item. Below is an example of the single item version of the widget (there is also a multiple item version):
As you can see from the way these widgets work, they’re very interactive; giving users an opportunity to do things like place bids, see how much time is left in the auction (it counts down), search for other items on eBay, or copy the widget to their own blog. Here’s a video of News.com’s Martin Lamonica interviewing eBay’s Stephen Chang about the widget:
