Facebook Integrates Book Swap Feature into Marketplace

Facebook has developed a book swap feature for its Marketplace application called Marketplace Book Exchange that enables users to buy and sell books from and to each other. Books are identified by buyers and sellers by their ISBN numbers, and curiously it looks as though there is no way to view all of the books offered in a particular network.

On the one hand, this appears to be a smart move for Facebook, as college students are fed up with buying expensive textbooks from their college bookstores. The Social Graph certainly lends itself to buying and selling items from others within a localized market, such as a college campus.

However, Facebook is not the first to try helping college students find better deals online. There are several websites, such as Campus Books and eCampus, dedicated to this purpose. There are even two applications developed on the Facebook platform - Swap Roll Book Exchange and Campus Book Exchange - meant to help Facebook users find books and other items that others currently own and are willing to sell or trade.

While these Facebook applications have a combined total of less than a thousand users each, they may have experienced a surge of growth as students return to campus this Fall. Now that Facebook has developed its own application for book-swapping purposes, these independently developed applications don’t have a chance. Moral of the story for Facebook application developers: if the idea behind your application is any good, expect to see Facebook develop its own application to supplant yours. Don’t expect them to just sit on the sidelines and watch.

Thanks for the tip Noah.

Israel’s Kontera Nails $10.3 Million Second Round From Sequoia And Others

an Israel startup (although their official headquarters is in San Francisco), is cashing in on the full-on bonanza around anything that calls itself an advertising network right now.

A year ago they raised $7 million from Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. Tomorrow they’ll announce a second round of financing - $10.3 million more from Carmel Ventures, an Israeli venture firm. Sequoia and Lehman are also participating.

Kontera’s main product is in-text advertising. They’ll take popular keywords within the text of an article and put double lines below them to signify it’s an advertisement. Clicking on it generates cash for the publisher. A demo of the product is here. In the press release a customer claims to be seeing 10% click through rates from the ads.