This week in "what's awesome"

Several things are new and awesome on Bonanzle.

The biggest deal of the week is that we're now hooked up to Google Instant Messenger! I've written a help page about what this means here. In a nutshell, you can now be "online" to answer questions and chat with people who see your booth all day without even logging onto the site. What's more, it's free advertising for your items, because booths that are "live" get top billing in search results and on the home page. I'd highly recommend you see the help page and get signed up today. It's as easy as can be.

In other news,

• We've made a series of performance passes, and from what I can tell, the site is now noticably faster. Though if you happen to find parts of the site that break this rule, I'd like to hear about them.


• A bunch of new options have been added to the "Personal Info" page (under "My Bonanzle"), including the ability to get an IM every time a logged in user visits your booth.


• Yahoo! Shopping has been added to the new item form to allow you to find a pre-written description for your item (in addition to using it to find a good price for your item). For the time being, Yahoo! has replaced Amazon as our price guessing service as well. In the next week or three, I'm going to re-add Amazon so you can choose between the two, but Yahoo results have seemed to be generally better.


• Friends can now be invited via the "My Bonanzle" page. We make it as easy as can be to let some of your pals know about the stuff you've posted on Bonanzle.


• Coming soon: People. While the site has been intentionally left a little bit sparse over the last month while we've ramped up and tested things, that is soon to change as we move into broadcast mode during the month of June. So keep setting up those booths, cuz it won't be long until there are people around to buy from them.

That's it for now, as usual, keep the feedback coming!