eBay launches their take on Social+Ecommerce - neighborhoods

First it was blogs and then a wiki and now eBay has released a slice of social networks mixed into the eBay world with the release of neighborhoods.  I of course immediately joined the Star Wars group with 70 of my closest friends.  Here's what you see when you are in a neighorhood:

Everyone in the SW 'hood is able to see guides, discussions, related listings and related neighborhoods around the world of Star Wars.  Ok.  I guess I don't get me to buy more Star Wars stuff on eBay?  Although this is a nice presentation, I don't have time to plow through 25k listings and this hasn't really leveraged social ideas like StumbleUpon (which eBay owns, but oddly doesn't seem at all involved in this) that will allow my 70 new friends to help me sort through all that mess.

Faithful readers, what am I missing?

Comments

[Mike Searles]

I was exploring the burgeoning neighborhood built around comic books and, like all e-dorks in their geek glory, started a discussion thread on a random subject. Being "my" thread, I subscribed to it via RSS, in you know, it demanded my valuable attention. 2 posts later and someone was trying to gently market their wares, currently available in their eBay Store. I GUESS the hope is that this type of interaction will allow like-minded people to offer items that fit the "impulse buy" behavior. That said, it's completely manual, nowhere near scalable, and (given the StumbleUpon technology eBay owns, as Scot mentions) kind of silly. Then again, if you're a hobbyist of some sort, it *MIGHT* expose a few gems you would have otherwise missed out on. But it doesn't seem suited to business at large.

TameBay's Chris Dawson has other ideas on "how to sell using neighborhoods," however.