eBay Reviews & Squidoo: Billpoint & PayPal?

Interesting times.

eBay is trialling its own reviews & guides forum for users to create product reviews, opinions, and actual instructional guides. It's sort of like a mix of Amazon's user reviews with About.com product guides.

At the same time, marketing guru Seth Godin is about to go live with his latest startup, Squidoo. Squidoo offers users the ability to create "lenses", or pages with specific content about anything. Unlike blogs, they aren't meant to be updated or chronological. Seth expects people to create product guides and reviews, and earn adSense fees from the click-throughs.

It seems to me that the problem with eBay's (and eventually Amazon's) user-generated content systems is that they are fundamentally closed systems. The content is glued to the host platform, and that limits the utility to users of the system, no matter how well it's implemented.

On the other hand, Seth's system is much more open. It's not tied to eBay users or Amazon users, etc. If it's well-built from the UI standpoint, I think Squidoo could have greater potential to attract users.

Could this be Billpoint/PayPal all over again? (memory lane: more nimble and open PayPal beat eBay's homegrown Billpoint billing solution, and eBay ended up just buying PayPal and all lived happily ever after)

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