Windows Live Expo (previously code-named Fremont) has opened for business, and since BetaNews is talking about, that means I don’t need to worry about my NDA (much) anymore on this one.
Expo is now available to select companies and schools:
- University of Washington
- Boeing
- Washington Mutual
- Safeco
- Microsoft
- Microsoft Alumni
- University of Washington Alumni
If you are in one of those groups, I encourage you to sign up immediately and try it out. I’ve been in the beta for several weeks (more on that later), and the service shows great promise, and only gets better the more people sign up.
See, everyone calls Expo a “Craigslist killer” or ripoff, but what makes it different (and keeps you from signing up right now) is that Expo pays big attention to what groups you belong to. You sign up with a domain email address, like your work email, or your school email (and you can sign up with multiple if applicable) and Expo lets you deal only with those people.
Its like Craigslist, buts its more like Facebook.
Expo is all about buying/selling/trading/finding the items/people/events in your community. That “community” is determined by what you search for. It can be people near you (like Craigslist, although you get to be a lot more specific than that), people you work with, people you go to or went to school with, or people in organizations you belong to. This means that, unlike Craigslist, you can develop a level of trust and familiarity with your personal marketplace, a huge advantage over the “anything goes” at Craigslist that your grandmother will never go for.
Expo divides everything up into categories of items, services, people and events (I’m not getting too specific until I get confirmation that the NDA is off). You search automatically by a global setting, one for where (city + distance radius) and one for who (email domain group). You have your setting in there always, as your default, you can change it instantly with a single click, and you can fine-tune it as needed.
Your searches use this global setting, as does the home page. When you click on a category, you only see the listings in the category that fit your global setting (making it really a search itself). This means that you have one front page, and everyone sees the same page, unlike Craigslist where you have to click through an unweildly list of all the cities in the program.
I’m starting to think I’ve said too much, so I’ll leave it there until I get official word. I can promise that if there are any further press reports, I’ll give more information for you guys than they do, as much as I can push out. Check out my previous articles on this, one of which has plenty of other good details.
I’ll leave you with some quotes from the article that shed more light on features:
Users would be able to modify their listings with a WYSIWYG editor and post images as well.
The service will integrate with other Windows Live services, including Live Local, allowing a user to narrow down searches and find items within a certain distance. Through Live Messenger, users would be able to discover new listings through “gleams” next to their buddies names. Spaces integration is also planned, with the capability to post one’s own listings on their Space through an optional module.
To facilitate communication between buyer and seller, an option is provided that allows buyers to instant message the seller through MSN and Windows Live Messenger.
In the initial beta the seller would receive a dialog box asking whether or not they would accept messages; in the future an IM bot will handle the conversation allowing for complete anonymity and also identifying the message is regarding a Live Expo listing.
The most popular items were tickets to concerts, and the most popular categories electronics and computers.
For example, the user could limit listings to just those in his address book or buddy list, to people within the same e-mail domain, or within a certain radius of his or her location.
“We’re more local than Craiglist,” he chided.
Unlike the classified listing site, Live Local is more based on whom the user wants to buy from rather than where the item is located, Wiseman explaned.
“We have social networking available today,” he said, pointing to the company’s Messenger product. “By tapping into this social network we can create a more trustworthy marketplace.”
(Found on Findory )
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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