The Expo team has been busy. 

 

First, a few things about Team Expo:

- we are a small development team within Microsoft that focuses on what we think is cool technology and cool consumer experiences.  We don't have a marketing budget.  We believe in providing a positive consumer experience that we hope will earn word-of-mouth and some notion of viral.

- we are very focused on innovation and trying to nail core consumer needs.

- many of our recent changes and updates have been on the backend - focusing on robustness, scalability, and up-time.  we believe these investments will pay off over the long-term.

 

Next, a quick summary of some consumer-facing changes from our latest release.  We're pretty damn excited about a few of these:

 

- Buddy Alerts - we have launched a new feature that allows a user to post a listing and automatically opt-in their Messenger buddies to be notified with a 'toast' indicating that their buddy has posted something for sale on Expo.  In the first few days, the numbers have blown us away and exceeded our projections for number of alerts sent and click-thrus to our users' listings.  This new feature helps us to capitalize on the original idea borne out of Expo over 2 years ago: providing a classifieds service within your trusted circle of friends, classmates, and coworkers.  A year ago, the Wall Street Journal coined the concept as 'Social Classifeds' as more and more companies looked at this idea and extended them into their own services. 

 

- Local Focus - we have optimized the site to show local listings on your home page.  We have also started suggesting local locations for your searches with IP lookup.  You can change this local focus at anytime.

 

- Anti-Fraud - we have enhanced some of our backend services to help fight potential fraud issues

 

- Performance - our customers told us that search queries and overall website performance was slow.  We listened.  We improved performance significantly.  And, we're pretty happy with the new performance - but recognize that this is an ongoing effort.

 

Thanks for using Expo - feel free to drop us a line at expo@microsoft.com

 

- Kurt of Team Expo