I’m sitting with Jonathan Gabbai from eBay at Olympia and he’s just told me about eBay To Go, which is a pretty nifty way of embedding practically any eBay object in a web page. That’s what I call widgetisation.
Jonathan’s telling me that this is a great way to expose the company’s API to users who may not know what an API is. It’s an example of a business making use of its own API to package services for partners. The widgets are a bit wide for your sidebar right now but will work fine in a blog entry. Jonathan reckons there’ll be a more flexible version along soon. Can’t wait.
I’ve chosen to embed a search term (‘Nikkor’) but you can embed individual auctions and you can even specify a fall-back for when the auction expires (after 3 months). I expect a wave of blogs featuring stuff that’s happening at eBay right now, especially once users can earn an affiliate’s commission for carrying the widget (which is also coming, Jonathan says). People will ‘curate’ eBay in much the same way we’re ‘curating’ Radio 4 over at Speechification.