Amazon Beat eBay in Holiday Traffic. “For the month of December, for the first time, more Americans clicked over to Amazon.com (59,624,000) than eBay (59,374,000)”

Kindles on Ebay are going for over $800.

EBays Billion Dollar Lesson in the Value of Hype - New York Times Blog. at least lots of people were skeptical at the time when ebay bought skype.

Google Gives Up on Competing With eBay’s Big Boston Party - New York Times. nothing like a classic pissing match.

The Ebay Architecture - PDF. 37 page presentation about the evolution of ebay’s system architecture. lots of details about what technologies they’ve used.

Cringley on the Ebay/Skype Deal. Really, I still haven’t seen a convincing arguement that this was a great deal for Ebay but Cringely, as usual, makes some great points. My only thought: This is Ebay’s in-road to make PayPal actually competitive with Visa/MC. If Skype becomes the defacto VOIP for 500 million paying customers (instead of 50 million barely-paying customers) and they’re all using PayPal, then PayPal becomes an equal pay method in the mind of customers. Then eBay is taking VISA/MC’s small cut on piles of new transactions.