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09 Mar 2008
eBay and MicroContent
Lately , I started playing with eBay. Can you imagine that I never did anything with. In the mean time I already bought my first item. Naturally as I am not very fond of heavy web-pages, I started looking for clients that can support me in following auctions. I found GarageBuy and JBidWatcher. The first is a real MacOSX application and the latter is a Java app that has been ported.
First of all we have to look where we can find the MicroContent in auctions. The MicroContent Item is the auction itself, with the auction ID, current price, auction closing time, Item title, seller-namer and seller-location. And there are probably some other fields as well. Each auction has a permalink at eBay, such as this one. I wonder how long these permalinks stay around.
The information on the auctioned Item is a MicroContent type in itself. I get the impression that eBay does not offer to much structure for this, but I have look a bit more into that, when I use a sell client, such as GarageSale or iSale. These two MicroContent Types (auction and auction-Item) are a bit merged. I am not sure whether this a good or bad thing and whether we have in fact two different MicroContent types. In contrast to normal shops, where the Item refers to a product-category, in the case of an auction one points to a single product, with all its defects.
Interestingly an auction MicroContent Item, is dynamic as buyings can place bis on Items and thus influencing one of the fields on that Item. In fact each bid can be seen as a MicroContent Item itself. The clients I looked at have no support for following bids and one has to refer to the corresponding web-page.
JBidWatcher presents a single window with a single pane. This pane (Items-pane) contains a list of all auctions that are followed in table format. The table contains fields such as auction number, auction title, seller-name, etc. It is not possible to add or remove fields.
GarageBuy is a bit more complex with a three pane setup. This reminds a lot of a standard MicroContent Client. There is View-pane with information on the auctioned Item (details-view). This contains either a description of the Item or the corresponding web-page at eBay. The Items-pane shows either a set of auctions or the details of a single auction. And finally there is a Lists-pane showing categories of auctions based on searches. Or auctions that are followed. One can sort these auctions into folders.
Unfortunately the mixing of searches and individual auctions breaks the logic a bit. I would have preferred to have a fourth pane for all the details.