http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-12-29-ebay_x.htm was an interesting article published in USA Today on Dec 29. For some reason, while doing some research on technology trends, my mind went back to its contents.

Kevin Maney used eBay as a reference to recap on the buying trends for 2004. I'd never have thought of eBay as a source to analyze the buying trends not only for C2C type interactions, but also for rationalizing the reason why specific brands or products became so hot in the market - not only online auction, but also in the entire consumer market.

Kevin Maney rationalizes this in the following text:

"Why use eBay? The Web site has become a mirror of our times. More than 125 million people use it; $1,060 worth of products flow through it every second.

It's a societal seismometer. When events happen, they show up instantly on eBay. When Ronald Reagan died, 6,000 Reagan-related listings popped up on eBay within 48 hours. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series in October, and listings of Red Sox paraphernalia tripled.

No executive decides what eBay sells. Millions of people post items in response to the shifting marketplace. It's organic. That's what makes it unlike any repository of commerce and culture in history. "EBay really does show us what's going on in the world," says Lynn Dralle, inveterate eBay seller and author of The 100 Best Things I've Sold on eBay.

Analyzing a year through eBay is not a perfect science, of course. But it's more fun than trying to do it by reading the Federal Reserve's "beige book."

Pretty convincing, huh? EBay is unquestionaly one of the main survivors of the dot net era, but to look at it as a source to analyze trends in the entire marketplace as well as to make predictions is not something that had even remotely occured to me.

Of course, in the dot com days, we could have just asked Jeeves :-)