eBay-Kaboodle Partnership: Prelude to an Acquisition?

Ahead of eBay Live in Vegas, eBay announced a partnership with social shopping/bookmarking site Kaboodle that extends Kaboodle's "collect, share, discover" functionality to eBay collectors via "MyCollectibles."

The site is accessible through eBay here and via Kaboodle here. It's intended to support eBay's substantial community of collectors (arguably the core audience) and allow people to showcase, browse and interact with one another around their collections (no selling yet). Think of it as eBay's Flickr for collections. Here's Kaboodle's blog posting explaining it.

For eBay it's part of a larger push into social media (blogs, wikis). The collections are hosted on the Kaboodle site and links to eBay auctions appear beside the collections.

Kaboodle is one of the more simple and "elegant" social bookmarking sites in a now very crowded field (social bookmarking is popular but far from mainstream yet). The recently announced Google Notebook basically seeks to perform the same functions as do Yahoo!'s MyWeb and del.icio.us, as well as Plum, Wink and Furl among many other sites with similar functionality.

According to Kaboodle's CEO Manish Chandra, the relationship was the fruit of a long search by eBay into a social bookmarking service that could integrate tightly and easily with eBay. It wouldn't surprise me if in 6 months eBay announced it was buying Kaboodle and more broadly integrating its capabilities into not only eBay but the eBay-owned and category leading Shopping.com.

Others have already blogged/written extensively about this:

• Mylene Mangalindan at the Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd)
• TechCrunch
• Brian Smith at Comparison Engines
• CNet's Elinor Mills
• Jeff Clavier