It seems eBay is stepping into the social networking game, launching over 600 micro-social shopping networks within their site called eBay Neighborhoods. Each of these networks organizes itself around a different product category, urging members to find a sense of community in their shared purchasing habits. Currently, members can join neighborhoods such as Apple, Star Trek, Nintendo Wii, and even the San Francisco 49ers, with more being added according to member suggestions. Once eBay-ers join one of these neighborhoods, they then have access not only to visual product search within the category, but related content such as eBay reviews, blogs, and guides. Each of these is then organized and packaged into widgets that display the information on the main neighborhood page. Here, members can also post photos, participate in discussions and invite friends to join them in the neighborhood.

At first glance, the appeal of eBay Neighborhoods is undeniable. The design is an attractive departure from the bare-necessities look that we’ve grown expect from eBay, and the widgets provide a fun new way to interact with a site that’s been old-hat for nearly everyone since 1998. I found myself especially enjoying the product search widget, a grid of product images that, when scrolled over, enlarges and shows limited product and price information. If you like what you see, clicking on the item displays everything from a real-time countdown to the seller’s rating without ever leaving the neighborhood. In the end, clicking “Bid” still takes you to the product page, but I’ll be interested to see if they eventually add an option to bid from the neighborhood as well.

As a fan of tools like Etsy’s connections feature and Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus, I was also intrigued by the “Related Neighborhoods” widget that showcases a little tree of like-minded neighborhoods for members to explore. As the service grows more popular and this tool becomes more accurate, I’m excited to think what products I might discover by taking a look at some of these related neighborhoods.

Overall, I’d say the neighborhoods have the potential to be something truly great for eBay. I agree with Techcrunch, however, who argued that eBay should allow users to take these useful modules and post them on other sites like Facebook and MySpace, for both the benefit of the users and the service itself.

Making such widgets available would help draw more traffic into these shopping neighborhoods. And if eBay tied them into its affiliate-fee program that pays for each referral that results in a sale, you’d have these widgets all over the place.

Have you explored eBay Neighborhoods yet? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.