Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’ve been working for a while on a Facebook application that I think will be pretty neat. Today I came across Widgetbox and their DevShare program. An interesting idea on creating facebook apps without all the hassle. I guess the question just remains whether they have the feature set needed to create some of the advanced ideas I have for my facebook application. I think I’ll continue on with my app since it’s almost done, but I must admit that it’s very tempting to try to do it with Widgetbox. If only I had the time to play with it and see how it went.

I had read about a website called Etsy. It’s kind of like the Amazon of homemade products. I guess it’s also quite a bit like eBay since the products are generated by the end user. It has a pretty cool business model. I’m really interested in it since my wife made this cool chair. I figured she should sell it on the site and see how she could do.

The downside is the fees that Etsy charges.

Sign up – free, your own shop – free, listing an item – 20 cents, selling – 3.5% fee. That’s it. All listings include up to 5 images. Listings stay up for 4 months.

Sure they have to make money, but they should make listings free. Or at least your first 10-20 listings free. Let us try the site and see if our products make money. That way more people will try it out and if they start making money, you can be sure they’ll be listing a lot more. Plus, Etsy would still be able to take the 3.5% fee off the backend. Are you listening Etsy?

Thanks for pointing it out to me Fred Wilson.