Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe.

OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world.

As part of the agreement, hi5 will implement OLX features that include the ability to display ads on a user’s profile page and to see friends’ ads, as well as a feature to tell friends about their own ads via newsfeeds. OLX will also allow users to include videos and pictures in classified listings, comment, post/view listings in over 39 languages and 90 countries, and access the site from mobile devices. The latter two features are clearly meant to appeal to a large international user base.

Oodle, another major player in the online classifieds space, has been scoring similar deals recently with social networking services and portals like Facebook, MySpace and AOL.

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The news comes right after a significant financing round announced earlier this month, when 3 VC firms invested $5.6 million in the company, bringing the total in funding raised to a healthy $21.6 million. Meanwhile, its traffic continues to surge (see Crunchbase profile for some upward-pointing visitor number graphs).

I would be very surprised if Oodle ends 2009 without being acquired for a price that puts a big smile on the faces of their investors.

For context, from the release:

AOL Classifieds is expected to serve as a platform for sellers to promote their listings by leveraging the reach of Oodle’s network of more than 250 partner sites.

Buyers can expect to find deals with access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites. In addition, AOL Classifieds links consumers directly to classifieds listings on other properties within the AOL network, including AOL Autos, AOL Jobs, AOL Personals, and AOL Real Estate.
AOL Classifieds is the latest addition to the AOL Local Network, which is an online local network with a monthly reach of 54 million unduplicated unique visitors.

In addition to the launch of AOL Classifieds in the U.S., a site for Canada is also available beginning today. An AOL Classifieds site for the UK will be launching later this week.

(Via Techmeme)

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Its investors seem to agree, as they have just injected more capital in Oodle: Greylock Partners, JAFCO Ventures and Redpoint Ventures are adding another $5.6 million to the startup’s war chest, bringing the total amount invested in the company to $21.6 million.

Oodle is already powering the classified listings for MySpace, and the roll-out for the Facebook Platform is supposed to start this quarter, effectively replacing an in-house solution (Facebook Marketplace) in favor of a product developed by an outside company, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent interview with Michael Arrington.

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As we speculated last month, Facebook is about to hand over its official classifieds listings to a partner, and that partner is Oodle, we have been able to confirm. An announcement may be made as early as tomorrow.

What is interesting about this deal is that Oodle already powers the classifieds on MySpace. Even though Facebook and MySpace are archrivals, this makes sense because in classifieds scale matters. The more listings and the more people seeing those listings, the better.

Classifieds so far have failed on Facebook because they have not been reengineered to be more social. Oodle should take a look at iList, which tries to make listings go viral by letting friends promote your listings for you.

By becoming the preferred classifieds partner, Oodle’s app would be promoted by Facebook in return for a cut of revenues generated by listing fees and the like. Facebook is also looking for a partner to run a preferred music service.

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According to our sources, Facebook distributed a request-for-proposal to a number of classified sites earlier this year (the same model they are using for Facebook Music).

The obvious partner is Oodle, which began powering Walmart Classifieds earlier this year. We’ve heard thin reports that they in fact have won the contract.

Whoever powers Facebook Classifieds (or Facebook Marketplace, as they call it) has a big hill to climb. Competing with Ebay (and their Kijiji) and Craigslist isn’t trivial. The original thought was that social networks were great for classifieds because you the buyers and sellers know each other. But Facebook’s current classifieds system shows anemic listings. The Silicon Valley network, for example, had a total of ten new listings added yesterday. San Francisco had twenty. New York City – zero. And for those who’ve forgotten, Microsoft launched their own classifieds site based on MSN friends and private networks (like businesses), and it went nowhere.

Part of the problem is the limited functionality of the existing classifieds system, which allows a short listing, a picture and communication via Facebook’s messaging system. Better software may mean more listings (although the bare-bones and massive Craigslist is a clear exception to that rule). Oodle, or whoever wins the contract, may also bring lots of listings from their other networks.

If Facebook gets this right there is a potential for lucrative advertising dollars – people looking to buy stuff are easy targets.

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Since the last time we gave an update at the beginning of the month there have been 20,171 layoffs at tech and media companies added to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 58,709 tech layoffs over the past two and a half months. You can mouse over the iChart above to get a sampling of some of the companies that are downsizing.

One previously unreported layoff we have been able to confirm is 10 people at classifieds search engine Oodle, which occurred last week and represents a 20% reduction. Another layoff happened at Rearden Commerce, which trimmed about 40 people, or 10 percent (and Rearden just raised $100 million, showing that no company is immune).

The biggest layoff this month was announced just today by Sun Microsystems, which will be reducing its headcount by 5,000 to 6,000 (15 to 18 percent). Other big tech companies also announced cuts earlier this week, including Applied Materials (1,800 layoffs), Nokia Siemens Networks (750), and National Semiconductor (330).

The big tech and media companies account for the biggest number of layoffs, but when you look at the percentage of total employees being laid off, startups are cutting just as deep if not deeper. For instance earlier this month, Spot Runner cut about 30 percent of its staff (115 people), Dash Navigation eliminated 65 percent (55 people), and BitTorrent got rid of 50 percent (18 people). This past week we saw a 38 percent cut at Jobster (15 people) a 15 percent cut at Metacafe (11 people), a 10 percent cut at Current TV (40 people), and the complete shutdown of CBS Interactive’s Juke (5 people).

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article. (For those more interested in who is hiring, check out our job board).

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Microsoft Live Expo, their experiment with classified listings that launched in early 2006, will be shut down on July 31, says a notice posted on the site. New listings have already been suspended.

This comes as Craigslist solidifies its position as the top free listings service. Other services like Kijiji (owned by eBay) and Oodle (which recently partnered with Walmart) continue to grow. Recently Kijiji has made waves about their impressive growth rate. And other classified listing startups continue to get funded.

There’s just no room for Microsoft in the classified listings space, it seems. It joins the deadpool.

A screen shot of what it looked like in the good days is below.

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The listings are free, which means Walmart is likely doing the deal to generate page views and advertising impressions. They also now compete with both Craigslist and eBay-owned Kijiji.

Walmart has a mixed history of success with Web businesses, but Walmart.com attracts 26 million visitors a month in the.U.S., according to comScore. Amazon attracts 47 million.

The classifieds listing’s went up quietly last week on Walmart’s site. The deal should help Oodle compeet against eBay’s Kijiji, which recently passed it in in the U.S., with 2 million unique visitors in April, versus 1.3 million for Oodle. Both trail way behind Craigslist, which has 30 million uniques, and is currently embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with eBay over Kijiji’s market entry into the U.S.

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Oodle’s new interface offers better guided search across its nine categories (cars, real estate, rentals, jobs, pets, tickets, personals, services, and items for sale). This includes the ability to refine your search in a hunt-and-peck way by selecting multiple sub-categories at once (for instance, you can look for apartments in both Williamsburg and Tribeca, or for Toyotas and BMWs, all in one search).

Depending what category you are looking in there are also lots of helpful geographical sliders and other suggested ways to parse your search (by breed, for pets; by make, price, year or mileage for cars; by neighborhood, square feet, or amenities for real estate; by gender, sexual preference, marital status, smoking habits, hair color, and zodiac sign for personals). Oodle surfaces comparative pricing information in a handy graph for categories where it has enough data, such as cars. (The average price for a used Mini Cooper in New York City, for example, is $18,132 and the 2007 models show the steepest price declines). It also gives an inventory forecast—”We found 258 listings and expect 35 more next week”—based on historical patterns. Most search results can also be seen on a Google map. .

CEO Craig Donato wants to make searching for classifieds across the Web as easy as searching for any retail product or service. But classifieds are a strange beast. He describes some of the challenges people encounter when looking for something listed as a classified:

When it is gone, it is gone—because it is one of a kind. Listings are poorly described and spread across many different sites. Searching is time-consuming. You are not just searching, you are hunting. And good deals tend to go quickly.

His approach at Oodle is to make such searches easier by adding guided categories to help people refine their searches, e-mail alerts and inventory forecasts to help people keep track of listings over time, price comparison tools to help them make a buying decision, and sophisticated spam detection to help them avoid being cheated. The search engine adds more than 500,000 listings a day from 80,000 sources, such as Autobytel, Cars.com, Career Builder, Monster.com, Kijiji, locally-tagged eBay listings, real-estate broker sites, and local newspapers.

Conspicuously absent is Craigslist, which blocked Oodle from searching its listings a couple years ago. “We have a lot more listings than Craigslist,” claims Donato. “They have massive duplication. On Craigslist, you pay with your own time to list again and again.” On Oodle, you pay if you want your listing to stand out from the crowd. “What people are paying for is visibility,” says Donato.

Oodle is creating that visibility, he says, by attracting two million visitors a month. Between 25 to 30 percent of its traffic is coming from partner sites, such as TV-station sites that want to get into the local classifieds business, as well as some regional newspapers that add local listings from Oodle’s paid inventory to their own classifieds listings (and keep the lion’s share of any resulting click-though revenues). Donato say he is in the middle of rolling out about 200 of such partner deals, and expects Oodle to turn its first operating profit next year.

Besides Craigslist, Oodle faces stiff competition from other vertical search engines that focus on classifieds, such as Edgeio, Vast, and LiveDeal. Oodle raised $11 million last March from JAFCO Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Redpoint Ventures.

Disclosure: Michael Arrington is a founder and director of Oodle competitor Edgeio.

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Oodle has expanded its listings through direct postings and a series of local listings partners, which it syndicates on sites like Yell.com, Local.com. include Engage.com, Local.com, ticket sellers, real estate brokers, colleges, and newspapers. However, Last year they lost their Craigslist feed. Edgeio and Vast are growing through slightly different ways. Edgeio has been partnering up with feeds from international sites, earning revenue by splitting listing fees (Edgeio marketplaces is a good example). Vast has been growing by crawling the deep web that lies behind login and search forms.

Oodle reports 20 million active listings from more than 75,000 sources in the US and the UK, when compared to Edgeio’s over 100 million international listings and Vast’s 25 million classified listings across 70,000 sites. Oodle, however, has some more advanced search features than these others, adding price tracking and maps where it makes sense. Their price tracking is a more basic version of what Mpire is offering in the shopping vertical.

Disclosure: Michael Arrington is a founder and director of Edgeio.

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This seem to be primarily a combination of meetup events and tickets from a number of ticket brokers, including stubhub. There’s lots on money in this space from affiliate fees, so it’s a smart move.

Oodle clearly needs to find new ways to generate excitement. Traffic is flattish and they recently lost the feed from Craigslist, an important source of classified ads. Oodle is all about decentralized content, a theme I constantly talk about, and I’m in their corner. I hope they find a way to make their model work.