Aug
19
(2006)
I’m trying to pick up a Newton Messagepad 2100 (still by far the best PDA ever created) via eBay, and was trying to find a way to track the item I’ve bid on via RSS so I can keep up to date on the auction.
But, eBay doesn’t offer an RSS feed for item auction notification? That seems like a HUGE oversight! It’s such a natural fit - I use RSS for notification from other things like Subversion, Basecamp, Tracks, etc… eBay would just fit into that. Every time something changes on an item, or on my watchlist, or my bidlist, there should be an entry in an RSS feed for me to monitor.
Or, have I just missed something obvious?
Update: Wow. Is eBay ever poorly designed. Waaay too cluttered. Stunningly ugly. It’s still got text rendered as images for some of the key areas, which is a decent enough option to make sure it looks good everywhere, but they did the rendering on some fugly system that looks worse than what Safari does with real text. If you’re going to go to the effort of pre-rendering text so it looks good, at least antialias it so it doesn’t look like it was coughed up by Windows 3.1!
And, sure, the eBay app does a heck of a lot of stuff, but the controls have been totally NASCARed, looking like the design team sat in a room thinking up all kinds of widgets that absolutely had to be less than one click away. Why not use some intelligent javascript/xhtml to selectively display these widgets? Things like the auction tracking options could be disclosed when you click a “Track this auction” button, which would provide you with the email, IM, and perhaps RSS auction tracking controls.
There’s a lot of required functionality, but 99% of it does NOT have to be only 1 click away. Also, it doesn’t appear as though much filtering has gone on for search result controls. It’s possible to sort lists by the Picture column. What does that mean? How do you sort by a picture? By dimensions? Number of pixels? Average brightness of the image? If it’s a “only show items with a picture” control, that’s what it should be designed to do, not simply repurposing a columnar sort.
Man. The more time I spend in eBay, the more my eyes bleed, and my brain aches. This is one of the biggest/most successful sites in the history of the internet, and they obviously don’t care much about the actual experience of regular users. I’m sure that once you take the 3-day “eBay Power Users” workshop, the cluttered UI is much more desirable. But for the rest of us, it just hurts…
Case in point: Change the email address for your eBay account. You have to provide a credit card to verify something (what? that you’re an actual person? that you can afford to use eBay?), and then it sends an email with a verification link. That’s all that should be required. Prove that the email address is really associated with someone that has control over this eBay account. Why on earth do they invoke a credit card validation? I’m borrowing Janice’s eBay account, and provided MY visa for verification, so it has nothing to do with testing identity. Silliness. The process involved several very clumsy steps that didn’t need to be implemented that badly. The company has revenue that equals many small countries, but they apparently/effectively don’t spend much on visible portions of the app…
RSS is poorly suited for real-time requirements on large public sites - too much polling of the server required. But an IM message makes sense. Perhaps they could do something with Skype.
IM. I am sure you can write a little program in java that recieves the message and provides it as an RSS or perhaps a GAIM plugin. There is also freshmeat to find some code to help you out too.
D'Arcy- considering E-bay has one of the WORST user-interfaces ever designed- why would you think they would do something like RSS to make things easy.
Just the way auctions close at a fixed time- allowing sniping programs to help smart e-bay'ers to win- instead of like a real auction that ends when no one else wants to bid for a few minutes-shows that E-bay never really thought about useability.
Talk about a company with value left on the table- it's insane.
Btw-when I used to buy stuff- I had great luck with esnipe.com
yeah. I wound up downloading a java sniper to monitor the auction a bit more closely, but felt rather dirty doing that. Sniping is cheap, just as in Quake (but at least it’s fun in a FPS).
D … I got your email and forgot to respond … I wish I could sell you the message pad 2100 in my office, but it belongs to the University. I got it on my second day with PSU back in 1998. You'll love this … the entire staff at ETS was getting these new Palm Pilot things, but since I was the new guy that hadn't ordered one for me. One of the guys there had recently gotten the Newton andI instantly snapped itup from him. It is stacked with all the goodies — little Newton keyboard, case, a HUGE 32 MB memory card, fax modem, and more … one of my students a couple of years ago got it running wirelessly with an old 802.11 card. It is good technology, but keep in mind it is over 10 years old. If you are really looking for something powerful that is modern, maybe try a Treo or Moto Q … something that easily syncs up with your modern Mac. I can't get my Newon to keep track of things for me b/c I need to sync with Oracle Collaboration Suite as my calendar …
At any rate, it is up to you. Sorry I can't just dump mine on you. BTW, the device that I still want to today is the eMate. Now that thing seems VERY cool. I have never even touched one.
One last idea to monitor eBay stuff, go grab the desktop widget dash clipping at http://www.utsire.com … it is a lot like that nifty little web clipping thing Steve showed at WWDC. Not quite as handy, but a good little way to keep an eye on stuff.
cole - np. figured something like that, which is why I headed to eBay. must… have… newton…
I have to use the craptacular Oracle calendar system, too, so all I really want the Newton for is a way to take notes and do a little writing without having to lug around a Powerbook. A Treo etc… would be overkill, especially when what I really want is the handwriting recognition and drawing/sketching of the Newton.
I JUST found the IM update link. What a screwy UI. It’s in tiny print next to “you can also:”. But, it borks on my Mac.com AIM account. Oh, well…
I'm pretty muchy an eBat n00b, but have used it to buy some really old software, and a few no longersold iver mp3 recorders. Certainly agree that the interace feels extremely bulky.
As far as experience, everytime I trid to bid on something, I got out bid automatically…. it was hardly anything that would inspire me to participate… anything I get there is smething I'm willing to pay the "buy now" price and to save the bid process.
Since eBay didn’t have good RSS functionality I made it myself. Looks like it is exactly what you’re looking for. (An rss feed that will have a new entry everytime the price changes). Check it out at auctionmonitor.net