As we speculated last month, Facebook is about to hand over its official classifieds listings to a partner, and that partner is Oodle, we have been able to confirm. An announcement may be made as early as tomorrow.
What is interesting about this deal is that Oodle already powers the classifieds on MySpace. Even though Facebook and MySpace are archrivals, this makes sense because in classifieds scale matters. The more listings and the more people seeing those listings, the better.
Classifieds so far have failed on Facebook because they have not been reengineered to be more social. Oodle should take a look at iList, which tries to make listings go viral by letting friends promote your listings for you.
By becoming the preferred classifieds partner, Oodle’s app would be promoted by Facebook in return for a cut of revenues generated by listing fees and the like. Facebook is also looking for a partner to run a preferred music service.
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