?My World' is eBay's attempt to jump on the MySpace bandwagon. Notice any resemblance? MySpace. MyWorld. You can't blame eBay for doing this, but they're about 2 or 3 years late in Internet terms, which in the real business world probably equates to more like 5 years. Things happens very fast on the Internet.

This is one of the problems with companies that are so large. They get bogged down with their own bureaucracy. Compare eBay to a small, fast moving company like dig, fark, or friendster - when these companies make decisions that take a couple of days to implement, eBay goes through at least 3 months of planning to accomplish something similar.

It's a disease that most large companies have. No one wants to put their butt on the line to accomplish something different, instead there's a loooooong chain of command, protocols to be followed, and even once it gets approved the huge teams of programmers simply put the proposal in their ?queue', to be acted on at their convenience, when they've ironed out the latest set of bugs.

The Opportunity

Looking at the positive, ?My World' does offer an opportunity for the smart eBayer to promote their business (rather than themselves, which stupidly the majority of eBayers still do ? ?my dog's called spot' etc etc, you know the drill).

Each registered user has their own ?my world' which consists of 6 modules: Favorites, Blog, Listings, Bio, Store, and Reviews & Guides. ?Favorites' shows a list of your most recent searches, sellers and stores. Use this carefully because at any given time, your most recent searches will be available for all to see. Of course, you can turn the feature off if you like, but it makes sense to use it. My advice is to use an account for searching that's separate from your selling account. That way, you can save

searches on your main account that will stay on there permanently, does that make sense? Obviously those searches will be for your own products, as an additional way of promoting them.

The blog module is fairly self explanatory. Set your blog entries to show ?long excerpts' to maximize your keyword opportunities for SEO.

The listings module is also self explanatory, it displays your choice of current listings. Again, use the widest number available, or you might also want to feature a specific item, but be sure to update it.

The advice about keywords applies equally to your Bio. Ignore the predefined sections and fill them with keyword rich content.

If you have a store, it makes sense to promote it, and it's super easy to do that in this module.

Finally, the reviews and guides module allows you to display up to 5 of each type, so use them all, and uncheck the boxes marked ?display the titles only' for obvious reasons.

?My World' is free, so it makes sense to spend ten minutes to set it up and occasionally monitor it.