Will Facebook Succeed Where Tribe Failed?

The move that Facebook is making in partnering with Oodle to offer a free classifieds marketplace on the site is something a replay of an earlier failed attempt at improving Craigslist. Brad Stone in today’s NY Times provides a general overview.

Tribe, as you may or may not recall, was going to create a “more trusted Craigslist.” This is essentially what Zuckerberg & Co. are doing though the impulse is to create more utility for Facebook users rather than emulate Craiglist’s business model (which is what Tribe was doing).

Here are the questions people are asking:

1. Will it work? Define “work” but probably in a relative sense, yes.
2. Will it hurt newspapers? Newspapers have already been hurt by the Internet. College students (Facebook’s main constituency) don’t subscribe to and increasingly don’t read print newspapers (online is different) and so any damage will be small and incremental.
3. Will it hurt Craigslist? This will be interesting to watch. My guess is that it won’t because of the strength of the Craigslist brand and the general trust that users place in the site.

It has a reasonable shot at success because Facebook is not building the back end itself and not starting from scratch with the content (Oodle provides both).

Community and classified listings naturally go together — Craigslist is very much a “community,” though not like Facebook. And with companies like Edgio, Oodle and LiveDeal (among others) offering content and platforms to third parties we’ll eventually see “classifieds” as a kind of frequent “layer” in sites — sort of like community has become.

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Update: Brad Stone just indicated that his piece is about a broader play than the Oodle deal I wrote about. So I’m a little confused about who’s doing what precisely. The larger strategic comments remain the same.