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"The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.\nName: Yardsellr\nQuick Pitch: Yardsellr is a person-to-person marketplace that connects buyers and sellers using Facebook and Twitter.\nGenius Idea: There are a ton of shopping and classified sites out there clambering for your attention, a fact that Yardsellr CEO and founder Daniel Leffel \u2014 an eBay alum who launched the service in 2009 with a cadre of other eBay-ers \u2014 is well aware of. So, instead of creating yet another online marketplace, Leffel took a less direct route, looking to the social realm.\nAs people spend more and more time engaging with social sites like Facebook and Twitter, it only seems natural to take advantage of all those eyes and hours \u2014 which is exactly what Yardsellr does.\nYardsellr is a social marketplace that was built not to exist as a separate entity, but as a way to utilize your networks to both buy and sell goods from other like-minded folks, which is why Leffel doesn't agree with a lot of the comparisons to eBay that have been cropping up of late (a natural go-to correlation, considering he used to work at the bidding behemoth). \n\"eBay is a web destination where users go buy and sell things \u2014 and the key there is that it's a web destination,\" he says. \"Yardsellr is more of a service that users experience as an extension to the Facebook experience that they interact with in their feed. Users comment on and 'Like' feed stories about the products they love and those products are for sale. Yardsellr is providing a layer of communication and transactional tools on top of the social plumbing in addition to aggregating the communities of users who love these products.\"\nYardsellr works, in essence, like a Facebook plugin. Simply visit the site and log in, allowing the service to connect to your Facebook account. From the homepage, you browse a variety of categories of goods, which are organized into what Yardsellr calls \"Blocks.\"\n\"The Yardsellr shopping experience is organized around 'Blocks' (think yard sale/neighborhood metaphor) instead of categories because categories organize products while Blocks organize people,\" Leffel says. \"Yardsellr Blocks are really hundreds of micro-communities totalling more than 1.3 million people who are passionate about particular types of products.\"\n\"Liking\" a Block on the Yardsellr homepage is the same as \"Liking\" a Page on Facebook \u2014 that Block is thereby added to your Facebook news feed, allowing you to browse goods on Facebook as you would updates from your favorite bands, celebrities and news outlets.\n\n\n\n\nThe service also feeds into Twitter, but it doesn't look as though you can choose to follow certain Blocks via the website itself \u2014 still, if you visit a Block on Facebook, you can find the appropriate Twitter feed in the left-hand column of the Page. (This is kind of annoying \u2014 we wish you could directly follow Blocks via the Yardsellr homepage.)\nIn addition to shopping, you can also sell goods via Yardsellr. Simply click the \"Sell\" tab at the top of the page, enter a description of your product, and promote via Facebook and Twitter posts to the appropriate Blocks. You can also create a Facebook event and invite all your friends to your digital yardsale.\nIt's free to list and sell on Yardsellr, and you can specify your own price and shipping cost. Yardsellr adds a 10% fee to the buyer's final cost (the fee varies by product). \"Sellers can also opt-in to invest in buying extra traffic/exposure for their listings,\" Leffel says.\nThe social aspect of the site reminds us of other services, like Neighborgoods, which allow you to share listings via Facebook and Twitter. Still, this site has a much  more dedicated integration to social services than others we have seen. \n\"There are tons of buy/sell sites on the web and a number of them have built Facebook applications,\" Leffel says. \"However, I'm not aware of any that look at themselves fundamentally as living in the feed and that's our big differentiator. 99% of the activity happens in the feed and if you aren't there in a big way, you aren't truly integrated into the social experience.\" \nThis week, Leffel announced that Yardsellr had raised $5 million in a Series A round of funding led by Accel Partners and Harrison Metal, the latter of which furnished seed financing last year for Yardsellr. As for where that money will go, Leffel tells us: \"Developing out Yardsellr to its fullest potential is fundamentally an engineering challenge. There are machine learning problems, scale problems, usability problems and much more. The bulk of the money will be used to hire some of the best engineering talent we can find.\"\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, AnthonyRosenberg\nSeries Supported by Microsoft BizSpark\n\n\n\n\nThe Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/11/23/yardsellr/>