Facebook Brings Back The MarketPlace

Cyrus Farivar writing for ArsTechnica

Facebook has begun rolling out its “Marketplace” feature to users, allowing people to buy and sell items locally through the app.

Marketplace has existed for some time as part of Facebook Groups. (I’ve bought and sold some items through a local parents’ group for the last few years, and it works well.) Delivery and payment is handled separately from the app, just like similar ads posted on Craigslist.

The company said in a Monday press release that the feature would be “rolling out to everyone over 18 years old in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand on the Facebook app for iPhone and Android.”

The new “shop” button will replace in-app real estate currently occupied by Messenger, Facebook’s standalone messaging app. On Sunday, the company rolled out “Messenger Lite,” a stripped-down version released to users in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela, with more countries coming soon.

Facebook had a marketplace early on it’s life (almost 10 years ago), but decided to get rid of it.

From Wikipedia:

Marketplace

On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads.[196] Marketplace has been compared to Craigslist by CNET, which points out that the major difference between the two is that listings posted by a user on Marketplace are seen only by users in the same network as that user, whereas listings posted on Craigslist can be seen by anyone.[197]

If they would have kept it in 2007 I think Craigslist would never come to exist.