Solo Technology

Received an email a week or two ago suggesting that I give Cooqy a look. Here’s an excerpt (I’m assuming the author won’t mind since he sent the mail seeking publicity):

Saw your blog and thought you might be interested in checking out Cooqy, a Web 2.0 version of eBay.

Cooqy has a lot of cool features, but most importantly it reduces network traffic by 50x compared to eBay’s HTML website, making surfing extremely fast, most notably over dial-up.

What makes it “web 2.0″? Presumably the rich flash interface. Some casual use bears out the fast surfing claims and there are no page reloads to deal with. Does it speed things up 50x? No clue, but it certainly is faster.

What else makes it “web 2.0″? Tagging. Social aspects and, the old favorite: Tabs! Gotta love tabs and with cooqy, each search gets its own tab. The tagging might be neat down the road after more folks use it. But I loves me some tabs!

This first picture shows some search tabs and the default search results in “Photo Collage View”. Thankfully, there are other views as this one isn’t my favorite (I prefer the gallery view). Once you find something you’re interested in, click it.

After you click on the item, you get a dialog window with all the expected details (click thumbnail to the right). From here you can add the item to your watch list, do some tagging, see if any Cooqy users have a chat thread going or pop on over to eBay and bid on/buy the item directly.

I’ll confess I’m a pretty casual eBay user. I buy and sell maybe half a dozen items a year. But for searching I think this tool is pretty slick and intend to use while it is around. I like it. It is fast. Heck, it is even easy on the eyes. Only thing I haven’t quite figured out is if it will ever generate money for the creator(s). How would you monetize something like this without driving folks right back to eBay?

[press release]

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