I would see this not as mandatory information, but rather as optional information an OLX user includes, whether the user is a buyer or seller. In some cases, it wouldn’t be a big deal if the user included that info, but I imagine that in others – for example, if you’re looking for a roommate or a new hire – that information is quite useful and a buyer could potentially favor a seller who is in the buyer’s extended network.

I’m thinking out loud here, but maybe you could make deals with the different networking sites for the different sections of OLX – in other words, pursue vertical solutions. Case in point: for the jobs section, you would incorporate LinkedIn; for potential roommate section, maybe MySpace or Friendster; for the dating/casual encounter section, maybe True or Match; etc etc

Of course, maybe all this is overkill – specially now that you guys are taking your first steps!

Tribe.net tried to do just what you described but failed. When it comes to transactions as a seller you want as many buyers as possible to make sure you sell what you have and as a buyer you want as many sellers as possible to make sure you find the item you want. By limiting transactions to a social circle, you ended up limiting liquidity. Maybe the idea might resonate better in developing countries.

I like your second idea a lot more, though I don’t think many people will trust us (or anyone) enough to entrust their user id and password on various social networking sites.

My current solution, which is still in development, is to offer users an OLX badge that they can insert in their blog and/or social networking sites so they can advertise to their friends their listings on OLX.

I am also thinking of adding Rapleaf to the site – the site neutral rating system…

I can imagine that there are a few other “twists” you could give to OLX, mainly on the “Web 2.0″ front, and I’m going to share one potential twist: social networks.

You mention above that people in some countries might not be used to buying something through an online classified. You know what? That’s probably true! However, what’s definitely true is that people are used to buying stuff from friends – and from friends of friends. I think there might be an interesting opportunity there.

So, how about adding the capability of finding products/services that are for sale within your personal network? LinkedIn has done that for JOBs, but I imagine that the same could be done for anything else.

Now, the question is: should OLX develop their own proprietary “social network” or should you guys partner up with LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Hi5, or any of the many social networks that have mushroomed over the past few years?

One way I could envision the latter is the following (if, of course, you’ve figure out the partnership & technical details!):

When you sign up to use OLX, in your user profile you would let OLX know in which “social networks” you have a profile and under which usernames/passwords. So, when you do a search for a product/service, the results would also include how many degrees of separation you have from the listed product/service.

The feasability of this is uncertain, both on the technical as well as on the strategic alliance aspects – not too mention user adoption – but it does seem like an area that’s worth exploring!

yes, you’re right, Craiglist is closer to what you do… but not a small player :)

If you include bloggers into the publisher list, then my interactions with popular, major bloggers and as in the book of Loic Le Meur on blogs, they seem to all say that selling items like books, etc, basically referring to items-for-sale from Amazon is a much more lucrative business that Google Ads… They get a cut of a product (book, software, whatever) rather than a small cut out of a click value for directing someone to a website..
However, that might not apply to other type of publishers or I may have missed something..

I am not really taking on eBay. We are a classified site. It so happens that I think that auctions are a subcategory of the For Sale category in classifieds (a sub-section of the market) and that eBay can’t compete with our business model. But at the end of the day, we are really more competitve with Craigslist than eBay.

As for them launching their ad network – that makes a lot of sense – eBay has felt too dependent on Google for a long time. It’s going to be interesting to see if a CPA network can be as effective as a CPC network. I understand the appeal as an advertiser. Unclear as a publisher…

Fabrice, what do you think of ebay’s latest launch of adsense-like service, where thematic websites get ads from ebay that are basically items on auction at ebay?

also… does ebay have a mobile service… and what do you think of it..?

Alright, let me be straight, isn’t it huge than to try to take on ebay?