Ask HN: Please review ebay mashup | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review ebay mashup

flippity.com

8 pointsslay2k28 comments

Call me old-fashioned, but is pedo-bear a reasonable image for this site? You may regard it is a cool joke, but I regard it as a distraction.

Well, if it's good enough for the Olympics...

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/06/pedobear-official-ma.html

It's only a distraction if you can recognize it, which slots you into a pretty miniscule percentage of the population.

That said, I realize the responsibilities of being in the public view, but right now the site is hardly in anyone's view, so what's the harm ?

That's the very first thing I noticed on the site. A lot of early adopter types will recognize it instantly.

Cool, glad you recognize it, and your first reaction was ?

That you are not serious. I like 4chan and can laugh at pedobear jokes, but no way would I give you any money because you're trying too hard to be one of the cool kids and don't seem to understand or care that it might offend future customers. Keep business and personal stuff separate.

Point taken, but who asked for your money ?

Pedobear. Eww.

bad first impression.

maybe you're wound a little tight ?

not at all. you're hip and not afraid to publish subtle memes for the sake of others who get the joke.

If this just a fun mashup with no future use no loss. If it's a start of something bigger I got a bad first impression. Your not serious about the site.

I honestly thought you got xss until I saw the image was in img/smallpedo.

Maybe if I use your mashup you'll repost my personal data for the lulz, too.

Additionally, the very first image I saw in the google maps view was a pornographic shot of a woman.

I don't know if I happened to stumble upon an actual ebay item that was somehow using female full frontal nudity, or what... but between that and pedobear, I ain't goin' back.

Besides, I've seen this exact mashup before in a number of forms (hooking to ebay, googlemaps, and sometimes to other third party retail APIs) so I'm not sure what the point is. It's an undifferentiated product entering an existing market... and frankly, it seems less useful than the standard ebay API, where I can switch to distance specific search if there are too many results overall.

Meh.

I'm sure your search terms had nothing to do with it. Thanks for sharing.

1. Get rid of the image on home page that others have complained about.

2. Make the 'search radius' logarithmic.

3. On the map, why are multi-item pins orange vs. green? It's unclear and confusing.

4. Remember my location, search radius using cookies/session.

5. When I click on a pin, highlight the corresponding item in the list pane on the left.

6. Why not show me both (the eBay link + item pic) when I click on a pin or when I hover on the list pane on the left?

7. Can I have a feature to see 'buy it now' items only?

Overall, great work. Keep it up :)

Thank you for the constructive criticism :)

#7 - there's a checkbox for that called Show Auctions, maybe I should rename it. #6 - what do you mean show you the eBay link ?

I'll look into the others.

Re: #6

When I hover on an item in the list pane, on the right I see the bubble over the pin. The bubble contains the picture of the auction item but does not contain the ebay link. Now if I click on a pin directly, I see only one or more ebay links without any pictures. Just make both of these views of the bubble a bit more similar.

Did you know that clicking on the item in the list pane opens the eBay item page ?

But yeah, I'll make browsing the map-side a little more intuitive and have it popup images on the left hand side.

Wow! Very nice, I like it a lot! I think it's important for you to keep it simple. I think this could really take off if you do.

Sweet, like it enough to come back and use it on your own ?

I sat on the homepage for a minute trying to think of something I wanted to buy. You should offer some suggestions.

You're making me choose a category before I see the results? And also confusing me with text about getting spammed? I think some UI to allow people to narrow their search like "Show more items like these" would be better.

Other than that, it's pretty good. I loved seeing pictures of the items when I hovered over them. I'm usually not concerned about where an item is located when I shop on eBay (since I usually just get it shipped), but this provides a sort of craigslist-style take on it.

Hmm, good points... thanks.

And yes, the original was based on CL, but it was exponentially more difficult to operate.

The item pics, pointing to map locations is cool. Sometimes the pic obscures the map location though.

Also, the site has a bug where if you don't type in a location nothing happens. Seeing as it wasn't immediately clear to me what the site was, that kinda a problem.

I like the idea. Why the listings should be only from ebay? Aggregate listings from other popular shopping sites.

Nice, but why do you only allow US zipcodes?

Easiest place to start. Internationalizing will take more work, but it's on my list.

allow city names instead of zipcodes

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