The Life Ledger

Fitness is a way of life.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that eBay is close to acquiring StumbleUpon, according to a Wall Street Journal report. TechCrunch has this to say about the merger:

If the deal is finalized it’s an interesting move by eBay. Paypal was core to eBay’s Auction business. Skype could be justified as a tie into the Auction business as well. So where does StumbleUpon sit? People “stumbling” from site to site with a business model the revolves around selling page views seems like an odd fit. A sign that eBay is looking to expand into new markets perhaps? Time will tell.

The blogosphere seems to echo the sentiment - what’s up eBay’s sleeve? At a glance, StumbleUpon doesn’t seem to add anything to eBay’s core business. Look a little closer though, and I find two reasons eBay has a lot to gain from StumbleUpon - retention and navigation.

eBay has become a morass of auctions, barely navigable through search tools and categories. Auctions are mistakenly placed in incorrect categories, people mis-spell or don’t use the right keywords and title words, search results depend on words used in title and description - it’s a mess. What eBay needs is a way for its community members to select favorite keywords or categories and rate auctions, then use that information to weight and correct searches. As an added benefit, providing such community rating and commenting tools would give community members something else to do on eBay’s site, where they may possibly stumble across an auction or two that inspires a bid. Enter StumbleThru.

StumbleUpon’s new feature StumbleThru could very well be the feature that pushes eBay to new community-centered heights. Improved searches, randomly discovering auctions based on user preferences, a comment and product rating system, tagging - eBay appears to be purchasing in one fell swoop an entire community of people already enjoying and familiar with the process of rating and commenting on sites who would likely gladly do the same for eBay auctions - after all, who doesn’t like rating and commenting? eBay could even further expose auctions by offering a “stumble this on eBay” option in browsers and an official eBay widget or “blog this” feature. Once this core group of current StumbleUpon users builds visible content, I imagine more eBay users will get swept up in the excitement of rating and voicing opinions, using these new features to improve navigation and randomly discover new auctions. Amazon has shown us that adding community features is a great way to increase visibility and user-retention; with StumbleUpon, eBay could leapfrog into the community game and improve its existing technology at the same time. It’s a win-win.

GigaOM has something similar to say:

Look at this from the toolbar-and-Skype lens. StumbleUpon makes a toolbar that provides collaborative serendipity to find web sites. The toolbar, if you ask StumbleUpon users provides more useful and productive results, than say Google.

By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take. It is not that far fetched: Skype has been slowly integrating various different services (including PayPal) into its client, and slowly becoming eBay’s desktop backdoor.

I don’t know about the whole Skype thing, but I agree with what Om says without saying it - marrying the StumbleUpon community to eBay’s auction-centered site will improve searching, increase the amount of time people spend on eBay’s site and promote auctions. Surely that’s worth $75 million?

Anyway, if I haven’t bored you, here’s some more health-related items I’ve stumbled recently:

Better Ideal Weight Body Calculations (stumble reviews) - interesting calculator that discusses BMI & People’s Choice (new one for me) methods of establishing a goal weight. While I’m not fond of calculators that don’t expose the math, I really dig this line: “Women tend to imagine their ideal weight is unrealistically low, so they diet unnecessarily. Men tend to allow their ideal weight to be higher than medically recommended. Men and Women should learn from each other.”

Sports Fitness Advisor (stumble reviews) - articles and information on a wide array of topics, including workout routines for specific muscle groups, training ideas for specific sports and more.

The World’s 7 Most Potent Disease-Fighting Spices at SixWise.com (stumble reviews) - descriptions and health benefits of 7 herbs and spices, including research citations. The site has other similar articles including nuts and berries.

The World’s Healthiest Foods at whfoods.com (stumble reviews) - HUGE list of foods and their nutrition benefits. Articles include research citations. Great resource - I’ll be consulting this one myself.

ririanproject (stumble reviews) - great “positivity” blog with frequent articles on productivity, positive thinking, self-improvement and related topics. Interesting recent articles include “Ten Commandments for Living a Life Free of Regrets”, “Get Your Soul In Shape With These 11 Most Deeply Held Wisdoms” and “9 Effective Ways To Get 200% More Work Done”.

Eating Fabulous (stumble reviews) - a b5media blog focused on food-related news.

If you’re interested, you can follow all my reviews and join up as a friend at http://charshman.stumbleupon.com/ (soon to be stumbleebay.com?), and I’d love to see interesting links you’ve stumbled or discovered - leave ‘em in the comments.

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