EBay Live! 2008: eBay’s Micro Projects Program

Often more enlightening than eBay's User Conference is the Developers Conference which takes place in the days before.  It’s at the Developers Conference where future plans are revealed to third party developers.

The eBay PR people put “Project Echo” in the spotlight this year, a till now rather unspectacular directory for eBay applications which is supposed to bring eBay onto the same path of Facebook and Co, sometime in 2009.  More on "Project Echo", the "eBay Open Plattform", in the Feedback Forum.

More notable for the moment is the Micro Projects Program ("Be a Part of It!"), the future mechanism by which eBay will outsource interesting projects to external developers. 

In effect, a sort of mid-layer is created between developers who take part in the developer program (and normally work voluntarily on an idea they come up with themselves), and the developers who get pulled on demand into eBay development initiatives.

More info in the presentation (PDF):

"Micro Project is a term that eBay uses to describe projects or applications that are sponsored by eBay but developed outside the typical eBay product development process"

Ebay Countdown and the Ebay To Go Widgets are two of these outsourced micro projects.

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, translated by Jason Soo.