A Look at the BaeBo Mashup
So I finally took a look at BaeBo (If you haven’t heard of BaeBo it is a mashup that combines 10 different services)… When you first come to the BaeBo homepage it looks to be messy. Its main feature is combining Amazon, ebay and Yahoo! Shopping. You can type in keywords to do a product search on these three major e-commerce engines. The results come in columns below it. So you are esentially searching three search engines at once. This part of it reminds me a bit of A9 Opensearch.
Combing Amazon, Yahoo Shopping and ebay in some aspect is similiar to what we did with SecretPrices, except we use Shopping.com API rather than Yahoo API for pricing comparison. But the interface is radically different. We are using regular expressions (they rock!) to match exact products between Amazon and Shopping.com (and soon eBay). This provides some added-value to the end-user.
Another difference is that while SecretPrices focuses on a more formal website look and feel, BaeBo uses Ajax and newer technologies… Its cool, but clumsy and messy (espeically in IE). That seems to be the trend with these Web 2.0 mashups… As I tend to agree with Pete Cashmore, who states “it seems like all these mashups are merging into one homogeneous lump. Some of them are cool to play around with, but within a few days they’re forgotten” in his blog about BaeBo. The basic mentality seems to be: “I’m going to do this because its cool and I can!” Not a very good business model.
The “cool, but forgotten” part is exactly what we are trying to avoid with SecretPrices. Lets remember there are a whole lot of everyday people not in the blogosphere (yes reality still exists!) or even up to speed on any of this Web 2.0 jargon. They want simple, not cool techy stuff. So if you want your mashup to be remembered, I would make sure its useful and simple. Thats what sticks.
Back to BaeBo… I say overall- a lot of cool services are being called, but I definitely wouldn’t do my shopping there.
Technorati Tags: Amazon, e-commerce, A9, Opensearch, Yahoo, Shopping, Shopping.com, regular expressions, Ajax, Web 2.0, mashup
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I’m the creator of Baebo.
What can I say: A fair assessment. I recognize the UE is dreadful and am working to address it (would love some help on that front).
I also have a few new features that I’m adding to hopefully improve the overall experience. I must admit that there really is no business model behind this, it’s purely a technology experiment. The plumbing is sound (w/the exception of eBay which has exceed the API call limit).
Would love to exchange ideas with you guys.
Good luck with your site,
-fs