Cooqy is a Flash application which allows the easy, and graphically enhanced, browsing of eBay UK, Canada and US. I’d much rather such a site as this be in AJAX (because that’s Web 2.0 
), I still find the use of Flash simply amazing! When you press Launch Cooqy you get a nice sound, and you are taken to a page where you are given the option to log into Cooqy (though not eBay) or do a search without logging in.
When you conduct a search, results are displayed in a choice of 4 views. My favourite has to be the Yahoo! Maps view, which though great in principle – isn’t very accurate. My actual favourite view, which is actually likely to be used, is photo collage. Basically this displays a thumbnail of every results where the seller has paid eBay for gallery, for everything else it simply brings up a picture of a camera, this to me slightly defeats the object. I find this imaginative as they are not straight, but tilted, it is really attractive. The other views are gallery view, where it displays all results in a straight line and you have a list view which displays results in a similar way as to how they are generally displayed on eBay.
Search results are also tabbed. One other thing about the interface is that you can change the colour scheme. There’s also a live time left ticker – which saves the constant refreshing which you have to do on eBay!
Another feature of the site you can tag auctions: specifying if it’s a good item, good value for money and so on. You can also tag sellers, in a similar manner, however I find this a little pointless considering you have eBay feedback. For some reason, I feel uneasy about the word tag, as it is not used it it’s common form; perhaps review would be a better word? To do anything I’ve just mentioned you require a Cooqy account. You can’t bid through Cooqy though, which on the whole is good for privacy, but inconvenient.
Another note is that you can save searches as well as viewing a list of old searches. One thing I dislike about the site’s search in general is the 14 character limit, for example searching for dell c640 battery cuts down to dell c640 batte.
Finally, it’s worth to comment that it uses an engine I’ve never heard of, but am interested by, called OpenLaszlo. I like the fact that it at least uses some open-source technologies!
Update: Cooqy have a new logo!
(screenshots available: initial screen, tagging, photo collage view, and map view)
Tags: ebay, flash, cooqy, web 2.0, web2.0, web2, web 2, openlaszlo
Hey Joe!! That site looks like fun!
XXOO,
JTL
The good news : supports Opera.
The bad news : Doesn’t support India.
The unrelevant good news : I’m getting a new camera!
The unrelevant bad news : I’m sleepy.
Hi Joe -
Thanks for reviewing my website Cooqy! I appreciate your useful feedback very much. I am promoting Cooqy just via word-of-mouth for now until the concept is “fully baked”. Cooqy is still in full development…features are being added and modified on a daily basis. Cooqy is a one-man show, so I plead guilty to the good and bad with the website.
Re: the Flash runtime, the OpenLaszlo technology should allow me to generate a DHTML runtime later this year…if you follow the link to http://www.openlaszlo.org you will see a demo of this. If you are a technologist, I heartedly recommend taking a look at their technology. I could not have built Cooqy myself with anything else. Forgetting about the animations and screen effects, just the code construction aspects of OpenLaszlo are revolutionary…you just use XML and a bit of Javascript to build the UI…easier and better than building a Windows event-driven app. I see that Azhar used Opera to surf Cooqy…to be honest, I never tested with Opera and didn’t feel the need to…with OpenLaszlo you don’t have to worry that much about browser differences. It’s not perfect (i.e. the mousewheel works with some versions of Firefox but not others), but it’s darn close. I’m dreading if I have to use C#/ASP.NET or Java/JSP on my next fulltime job.
Re: the logo, you got me there…you’re not the first to comment on the logo. I was waiting to see if Cooqy is commercially viable before investing in a graphics artist. I’m a good coder, a fine pianist, and a hard worker…but graphic arts isn’t in my bag of tricks. Cie la vie!
The Yahoo! map view is driven off of postal codes that accompany the eBay listings. For whatever reason, UK eBay listings don’t contain all that many postal codes, from what I can tell. That is why when you have 10 items onscreen sometimes only 1 or 2 will be plotted. I haven’t figured out a good way to communicate this to users yet.
The Photo Collage view is the newest…I just built it about two weeks ago. I am looking to add an option that will download photos from the item listings whenever no gallery photo is present…the problem is that it will slow down search results. I didn’t want to filter out the photo-less items from the Collage view, so I left the default camera icons. Several of the gripes associated with Cooqy are born of limitations of eBay’s web services.
I added the Tagging system very recently. I originally built this b/c sellers on eBay often leave retaliatory negative feedback, which can make buyers not really speak their mind. At least in the USA, whenever I make eBay purchases the sellers never provide an immediate positive feedback, even when I make immediate payment. Why? Because they are waiting to receive positive feedback themselves first! Isn’t that wrong?? As a buyer, I did what was expected to receive positive feedback…an immediate payment!! I understand the confusion about the term “tagging”, as compared to something like Flickr. The feature is still being massaged. One direction I am thinking about is to turn the tagging feature on its ear to where it works more like a bulletin board…i.e. enable buyer “chat threads” associated with items and sellers. Another thought is to implement traditional freeform tagging. I would appreciate any thoughts from you or your readers on which may be better, or if this is just a useless feature and a dead end.
There is no 14-char limit on search queries that I know about…what is happening is that I am truncating the query string to 15 characters on the tab image to enable the creation of more tabs horizontally across the screen. I just added this behavior a couple of days ago, so its funny you picked up on it and came away with an unintended impression.
Major new functionality gets added to Cooqy on a weekly/daily basis…this is a direct benefit of the OpenLaszlo foundation. Since your review I have already added Australia support. If India is an English eBay site I could add that support in about 10 minutes. The Photo Collage items are now draggable across the screen…I played with the concept of allowing you to toss the items around, but thought it was a little too gamesy. With OpenLaszlo I can try out concepts like that in a matter of minutes.
Cooqy’s baseline functionality of just displaying search results well was only recently completed…say in April. I’ve only been working on the value-add functionality for a few weeks now. My goal is to continue to flesh out the concept and hopefully provide a free service that benefits eBay shoppers. Ideally, I would love to find a way to impact the frauds/scams/counterfeits on eBay!
Thanks again for taking time to review Cooqy! Keep checking back at the website, b/c like I said I implement major changes on a daily basis. You have me wanting to find a good graphics artist pronto…
Robert Yeager
Founder
Cooqy
Treat yourself to better eBay shopping
Robert: Sweet talk Azhar
I’ve sent him a separate e-mail to see if he would like to help test eBay India support. His photoblog is pretty cool…and he’s only 15 years old? I was coding on a Commodore 64 when I was 15, if you know what that is…
Hey I came back to check out the new Webbys World : awesome Joe!
Will send you a few headers and you can choose to use them the text looks crappy : great job.
Add a white or grey border to your images though and add some padding too.
I replied to Robert by mail.
Yes I’m 15
Also make ads background grey to match background which im sure is a hex code.
Make sidebar bit wider so you can have two buttons on one line or leave speaces on top & bottom to make it look neater.
Eugh – shame its flash – flash is too bloated for my liking, and any code is too messy.
How come your blog has so many readers? Mine is like a ghost town…
Ian: I’ve blogged for nearly a year.
Joe: Infact – I have blogged over a year too – just not all my posts are public or on my site.
Be more open. Blog a niche.
Ian, what do you mean by bloated?
Robert: Thats just flash itself. I just dislike flash, it is in my view overused (although this is a practical aplication using it). Although flash can be very powerful and useful, I think, expecially for an idea like cooqy, there would be another option. What that option is – I am not sure!
Ian -
Cooqy’s Flash runtime weighs in under 300KB. That is in fact about the same size as eBay USA’s home page. The runtime is cached in the browser until I release a program update…the next time Cooqy is run it loads much faster than eBay’s home page!
By later this year, OpenLaszlo will allow us to generate a non-Flash DHTML runtime, that will supposedly make someone like yourself happier…
After looking at facts, I still don’t understand what people dislike about Flash…it pretty much guarantees cross-browser compatibility and makes for a fine “operating system” on which to write applications like Cooqy IMO. I wasn’t initially thrilled about having to use Flash for Cooqy, but I got used to the idea once I figured out there weren’t too many downsides.
[...] Page Summary: My actual favourite view, which is actually likely to be used, is photo collage. Basically this displays a thumbnail of every results where the seller has paid eBay for gallery, for everything else it simply brings up a picture of a camera, this to me slightly defeats the object. You can also tag sellers, in a similar manner, however I find this a little pointless considering you have eBay feedback. I could not have built Cooqy myself with anything else.read more | digg story [...]
[...] Page Summary: Basically this displays a thumbnail of every results where the seller has paid eBay for gallery, for everything else it simply brings up a picture of a camera, this to me slightly defeats the object. I find this imaginative as they are not straight, but tilted, it is really attractive. You can also tag sellers, in a similar manner, however I find this a little pointless considering you have eBay feedback. I could not have built Cooqy myself with anything else.read more | digg story [...]
[...] Page Summary: Basically this displays a thumbnail of every results where the seller has paid eBay for gallery, for everything else it simply brings up a picture of a camera, this to me slightly defeats the object. I find this imaginative as they are not straight, but tilted, it is really attractive. You can also tag sellers, in a similar manner, however I find this a little pointless considering you have eBay feedback. I could not have built Cooqy myself with anything else.read more | digg story [...]
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[...] sure how much longer Cooqy can continue with this type of competition. Webby’s World has a detailed breakdown of the features in [...]