eBay Roadmap for User Generated Content

Originally Posted by
Lisa Tesler
in Developers Conference

Tuesday, Jun.17.2008, 11:51 AM

Earlier today, Sam Daoud, Senior Product
Manager in eBay’s Trust & Safety team gave developers a very early
preview of where eBay is headed with user-generated content. This
includes text, widgets, and other content that buyers and sellers post
on eBay.

He outlined a few of the threats that can be posed by user-generated
content, what eBay plans to do to safeguard users, and how these
changes might affect your applications.

If your application creates templates, widgets, or other active
content in listing descriptions, we encourage you to monitor the eBay
Developers Program blog and newsletter for updates on this topic.

It’s an Industry-Wide Challenge: Today, eBay
provides very few restrictions on user-generated content. We let you
put JavaScript, Flash, HTML, and other active content directly in
listing descriptions. In fact, eBay is the only major site in our space
that allows unrestricted user-generated content today. Most major
e-commerce sites allow none, and social networking sites typically have
tight restrictions.

Sam shared that we like how buyers and sellers can benefit from your
slideshow widgets, merchandising functionality, sophisticated hit
counters, and other rich content. So, his team is looking at how to
enable developers to continue offering these features to eBay users.

The concern is that rich content can leave users vulnerable to
exploitation. We need to make sure that buyers and sellers feel that
eBay is a safe place to do business.

What’s Changing on eBay: In the short-term, we’re
moving listing descriptions to a different domain. Descriptions will be
displayed by using an iFrame within the View Item page. Our intent is
to ensure that user-generated content won’t have access to eBay site
content. We’re currently piloting this in US Motors, and we’ll be
releasing this change in the US and internationally later this summer.

In the longer-term, Sam’s team is working on how to eliminate
malicious user-generated content, while still enabling meaningful
functionality and style in listing descriptions.

The idea is to create a small program to allow developers to offer
great functionality for users, using Flash, JavaScript, and other rich
Internet technologies. The difference is that you won’t directly
include code in listing descriptions. Instead, listing descriptions
would include a set of tags that load rich content using vetted widgets
and initialize them with parameters that you specify.

Sam’s team is still working on the details of how this will work.
But here’s the basic idea: Suppose a widget provides a slideshow. You
could load the widget by referencing it, and then pass in various
parameters, such as speed, special effects, and the image URLs. Here’s
a theoretical example to give you a sense of the approach:

<widget id=”YourRichWidgetIDHere”>
<speed>slow</speed>
<effect>fade</effect>
<img>http://SellersFirstPicture</image>
<img>http://SellersSecondPicture</img>
<!– more parameters could go he –>
</widget>

Again, this is just a theoretical representation (not the actual tags). eBay is still working out the implementation details.

What This Means To You: Sam explained that these
changes are intended to create a safer ecosystem for everyone. These
changes are intended to improve the buyer experience and increase trust
on eBay. More trust on eBay leads to more transactions, which is better
for everyone.

For application developers, this creates opportunities for you to
help users transition their listings, build compliant templates, and
aid in building out a widget catalog on eBay.

So, the key changes are that you need to use safe markup in
listings, and use widgets for active content. Widgets created by
approved widget developers will go through a vetting process to make
sure they comply with eBay security standards. If approved, the widgets
will be available to eBay users.

When This Will Affect You: We understand that these
changes may be disruptive to some users and to developers. That’s why
we’re announcing these changes now. We want to give you time to give us
feedback and to plan how to adjust to the new requirements. We’ll
provide a timeline, guidelines for safe content, and more details about
the new vetting process later this summer.

Got Feedback? Sam and Amjad responded to a number
of thoughtful questions at the end of the session. Sam is very
interested in getting early feedback from our developer community. So,
today we have created a developer forum thread where you can post your
questions: Request for Feedback on eBay’s Plans for User Generated Content