Oodles and Oodles of Classifieds on Facebook

Will Oodle be the death of Craigslist?

Today, Facebook announced that Oodle has been chosen to power its Marketplace, an online classifieds application introduced in 2007 to help users find items or roommates.

“Turning the development and management of Marketplace over to an innovator in online classifieds will give users more advanced ways to create and share listings on Facebook,” said Ethan Beard, director of business development at Facebook. “We’re excited by the potential of the Oodle powered Marketplace application to offer an engaging classifieds experience on Facebook.”

Since my days as an Ebay junkie are over, I decided to test out this service vs. my current online destination for cheap goods, Craigslist.  Afterall, I was able to purchase my baby (read an old-school, one-speed, two-toned cruiser bike) there.

So, I decided to do a quick search for a DVD player in Austin on Oodle, “the smarter classifieds site,” with no luck.  While the site was pretty, it returned zero results.

Next, I went to Craigslist and performed the same search, getting 742 items.

Finally, I went to the current Facebook Marketplace and got 3 results in just Austin, but 532 in all of Facebook.

Now, I know what your saying…Oodles is new and not integrated into Facebook.  Overall, I think Oodle has a good shot of making some real changes in the online classified world.  Location-based search and services are going to be increasingly important, especially since I predict Facebooks popularity to grow even more now that they have a single sign-on with other social networks. (InformationWeek: Facebook Links Social Networks With Single Sign-On).

While NI has a direct sales model, I wondering if we could use Oodle to sell student products, like NI Elvis.  If consumers are really successful selling via the Facebook social network, could/should companies do the same?