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Facebook Launches Marketplace On App, Takes On eBay and Craigslist (betanews.com)
Facebook today also announced the launch of "Marketplace," allowing users to buy and sell items on the social media platform. The company says more than 450 million people already visit buying and selling groups on Facebook each month. The new service will be available to people over 18 years of age in the United States, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand on Facebook's iPhone and Android over the coming days. BetaNews adds: The primary aim of Facebook Marketplace is to keep things as simple as possible. Both listing and searching for items is incredibly easy, and the focus is on putting would-be buyers in contact with sellers as close by as possible. The new feature sits alongside the many existing pages that have been set up to facilitate the buying and selling of goods, and Facebook has made it possible to post items to the Marketplace and individual pages simultaneously to help maximize your audience.
Wait, this launched TODAY? I've had access to it for several months now. I know they do limited A/B testing, but I've also browsed it for curiosity sake, and countless others in my local area have it too. Maybe the A/B test was regionalized? Not sure on this one. Anywho, I hope they fixed it. On my phone, it has worked well, but opening the market place would instantly crash the app on my Nexus 7 tablet. This was even more annoying, because swiping left/right in the app changed between the different tabs at the top, one being timeline, the very next to the right was the market place. Accidentally swipe right even the slightest, and it would switch to the market place tab, and instantly crash the app. That's one way to keep users happy and keep coming back to your app! Accidentally do the wrong gesture, and have the whole thing crash.