Facebook's MarketPlace and Senior Week

The announcement that Facebook would now be offering a Marketplace with Craigslist-esque classifieds sounded like a good idea to me, but I imagined that user adoption would only drip in little by little.

When I saw my facebook newsfeed this morning, I realized how wrong I was. Users aren't going to start using the Marketplace in drips and drops. They are going to flock to it in waves. This is because Facebook timed the launch perfectly with the annual rite of passage of Seniors trying to unload all the cheap stuff they acquired over the course of their college careers to open armed underclassmen. Now instead of parsing through hundreds of text emails on list-serves, college students will be able to easily scan hundreds of offerings on their facebook page.

So what becomes of the normal barrier of getting users over the hump of using a new feature? No problem here when timed around an accelerating event. Another smart move by the Facebook team.