Last year we had our local event WebDevCamp SP’07, where Manoel Lemos, from the sucessful BlogBlogs introduced us to his friend James Crane-Baker, co-founder of the RedeParede (literally, “NetWall”), a classified Web 2.0 web-service written in Ruby on Rails.

Recently he got in touch with me about releasing his services APIs to the Rails community and therefore I decided to publish more about these Santa Barbara, CA based guys. They are credible people and James actually lived in Rio de Janeiro for a while, so he understands our Latin culture better than the average american, which is good as they plan to cover not only Brazil, but Latin America. I hope everybody can take a look at what they are doing as it sounds very promising, and success cases like this only augments the importance of our community as a whole.

So, here goes James himself explaining his product:

So, but Brazil doesn’t currently have a classified market, or does it?

You are definitely right that the market does not exist in Brazil.. or anywhere else really… until now :-)

Classifieds is an interesting market, maybe not so sexy as a photography site or blog site but a very large market on the internet with almost 25% of internet users accessing a classifieds site worldwide. I think the reason is because they are very useful. The thing is, people really need a place on the internet to go to connect with other people in their cities to buy or sell things, find jobs or friends or houses/apartments and they should be able to do it for free.

So as you know this idea isn’t so new. There are many classified sites on the internet. But what they all do is follow the craigslist.com model which I actually think is an excellent site, but I also think the web is changing and we can do things better. Basically craigslist.com let’s users create simple anonymous classifieds ads. Then people need to go to the craigslist site to find the ads that interest them and contact those people through anonymous email services craigslist provides.

What is the problem with current classified websites like Craigslist?

The craiglist model is great, but it ignores some of the new web trends that can really transform classifieds online. Two of the trends I am thinking of specifically are social networking and open data trends.

Social networking can really help to get rid of the dangerous people and untrustworthy people you might find on a classifieds site. If you are able to see what someone has done on the site, see their friends, ratings, comments, testimonials and then see who their friends are and maybe even how you might connect to them through your social network connections, then you have a better chance at a safer experience in doing your classifieds transaction. At least it couldn’t be any worse. :-)

Open data is really where things start to get interesting. Most classifieds sites have to work very hard for a long time and invest capital into advertising to get classifieds posted to their site and to build to scale. (we are no exception as we do this too) Once those sites get to scale, they really try very hard to keep those classified ads on their site and only their site. We think this idea is wrong in fact we think the classified ad data should be as open as possible because people who post a classified ad are trying to get their message out to the broadest audience possible. We also think any friend information you have on RedeParede should be portable. You can see how people are beginning to complain about having many sites with social networks and having to recreate those social networks each time on each site. Your friend data is trapped on those sites and it’s difficult for you to get it out.

Opening our API is the first step for RedeParede in releasing this user data. We also plan on opening our social network and continuing to open our data structure to always remain as open as is safely possible for our users. We want data to flow both in and out of our application as much as possible.

And what are the benefits for Developers and Users or RedeParede?

OK so that’s the basic idea, but what does that really mean to users and developers.

Developers can really benefit because now they can access our data and use that data to create interesting applications. These applications can interact with the RedeParede application to post ads, create users, pull ad data and more. These can be full websites, sections of websites, blog plug-ins or just simple mashups… or whatever someone can imagine. These applications can eventually be very useful and potentially profitable for the developer or site owner. RedeParede is not asking for any share in potential revenue, nor will we ever. In the beginning these applications could be monetizable with Google Adsense or some other form of advertising that the developer chooses, but later we plan on creating an affiliate program because we plan on creating ‘premium classified ads’ and additional optional paid services. If a developer creates an application and sends RedeParede a user who eventually purchases a premium classified ad or service, any revenue we earn we would share with developers who participate in our program.

Here are a few of ideas I thought developers might create, but certainly not restricted to these ideas.

• A blog plug-in to display classified ads relevant to the blog’s user base. For example a blog about cell phones with classified ads. That blog section immediately is filled with relevant classified ads instead of an empty classifieds section.

• A mashup with Google Maps – A website wanting to have a classified section but doesn’t want to create the application, maintain the application or have the resources to seed the application with classified ads to start. Maybe a local paper, or popular blog or a surfing website. RedeParede does it all and hosts the photos.

Users benefit also. The more developers that participate the more their classified ads spread across the internet and the better response they get to their classified ads. Which is really what people are looking for when they publish a classified ad… success in selling, buying, finding or connecting to what they want. No longer will people have to publish a classified ad on a many sites, if they publish an ad with RedeParede or a participating developer’s site.. the ad will spread across the system.

The initial docs are here. http://redeparede.com.br/docs

The terms of service for the API will be similar to the terms of service for regular users. Developers will need to have an user account with RedeParede to use the API and later we will implement API keys however we have not done so at the moment. The terms of service will most likely change as we undertand how developers want to interact with the application but we are committed to working with as many developers as possible and accomodate to the best of our ability as much latitude as developers are looking for.