Sometime early May this year Trade Me opened up a little and made available XML feeds for auction listings by user. Not long after that Facebook launched their developer platform, and since then I've been thinking about putting the two together.
I finally got around to getting it done with help from Allen who designed a simple application page, and the result is the imaginatively titled TradeBook. If you are a Facebook user you can jump right in and install the TradeBook app on your profile. The application will automatically update your Facebook profile whenever you list something for sale on Trade Me.
Now, I have no clue how many people will use this (lots I hope), but I figure the overlap between Trade Me users and Facebook users has to be about as big a segment as it gets for this kind of thing. Every man, woman, child and their dog in New Zealand uses Trade Me. While Facebook is the social network du jour, and has certainly got more traction than MySpace ever did amongst the people I know anyway...
So we'll see. There's a few more things that could be done, but right now TradeBook has all the obvious features:
- Displays your Trade Me auctions on your Facebook profile (with title, thumbnail, current price and end date)
- Choose how many listings to display
- Automagically updates your profile whenever it detects a new listing
- Pings the Facebook newsfeed API whenever it detects a new listing
If you are so inclined, I'd love to hear any feedback you might have.
Tell us what you think...