JetBlue

Apologies for the dearth of posts. Been travelling and dealing with hairy partner issues (figurative not literal :P). One of my trips this past week was to NYC to visit one of our recently signed partners. I'd forgotten how freakishly cold the city can be. Had just gotten on the JetBlue plane to fly back to Oakland, when David Barger, JetBlue's president, jumped on the flight with a very humbling apology. Here he is with his orange flight vest...

I'd read about JetBlue's issues last week and frankly didn't even consider that it would effect my trip. If I'd been a passenger left stranded on the tarmac for 10 hours, I'd probably be considering harsher things to say. But without that luggage, it was great to see the president of a company take full and complete accountability for issues that, in my opinion, seemed fairly out of his control.

That type of direct corporate engagement with me as a customer (6 hours of SportsCenter helped as well) did a ton to increase my loyalty to the JetBlue brand. A rapid rabid response to catastrophic events from the very top of their organization showed JetBlue's true colors. Kudos.

(ex)eBay Bloggers Unite

Now that Jason (now at Tellme) has finally tired of maintaining BestofeBayBlogs (kudos for the effort), former highflying eBay VP of Corporate Strategy turned filmmaker, Shripriya Mahesh, has put together an eBay Blogs wiki. Such luminaries like myself, Greg Isaacs, Shri and Adam Nash are on this exclusive list ;).

That said, there's quite a lot of 'uninformed' opinion regarding eBay and its properties out there. While most on this list are now ex-eBayers, I'm hoping a few hardy souls at eBay (like Adam Nash) will push on the rich tradition of eBay blogging and continue defending the kingdom. eBay has a lot of things going for it... hopefully blogs can continue to be a good venue for expressing them.

eBay & Distributed Commerce

Looks like eBay is finally waking up to pushing distributed commerce forward. Apparently eBay is in talks with MySpace to provide an easy way for users to post things for sale (assuming the inverse would apply as well). Hopefully the good folks at my corporate alma mater can get past the notion that 'everything needs to come back to eBay.com'. If eBay really enabled a fully functional eCommerce widget/web service, where a seller can post and a buyer can purchase products all within a profile page (e.g. w/o leaving MySpace), they'd have something huge on their hands. If it's the typical affiliate application with a signpost leading back to eBay, well... it'll be something less than huge.

There's a real opportunity on the widget side for enabling a completely remote & distributable eCommerce experience. Cafepress, Qoop and Zazzle are leading the way here, as they begin introducing web services enabling individual users & sites like Rockyou and Photobucket to buy and sell photo and design-focused products. eBay is the natural winner in this space IF they make registration, trust and purchase completely remote from eBay.com the site. To date the company has pushed back on offering that through their web services due to concerns around fraud (which admittedly is a significant hurdle). But a deal with MySpace could be a fantastic motivator for making this happen and ultimately heralding a true entrance by eBay into the Web 2.0 world...