In a post about the prospect of PayPal parting ways with eBay, commenter Wabewalker shares some insider insight:

PayPal's CEO is talking up the company's business handling payments on websites other than eBay. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes: In April 2002, when I had coffee with Peter Thiel, then the CEO of PayPal as an independent concern. He talked up the prospects of growing PayPal's business on other websites. He agreed to sell PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion that July, and left three months later. And then I heard the story again, and again, and again, as eBay pushed a number of forgettable executives through the revolving door of PayPal's executive suite.The swift executive rotation was a deliberate strategy of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, a management consultant by training. She called it "repotting" — moving executives around through different parts of the business. While it may have helped her charges' careers, it did nothing for PayPal. The latest potted plant to occupy PayPal's C-suite, Scott Thompson, is bragging to investors that PayPal will soon derive more than half its revenues from websites other than eBay. A good thing, considering how growth in eBay's core auction business is grinding to a halt. Thiel saw this as a problem back in 2002. eBay was growing fast at the time, but PayPal's investors — the company was briefly publicly traded before eBay bought it — were worried about its dependence on another company. After eBay bought PayPal, executives spent years grinding away at "integration" — even though PayPal, as an independent concern, had managed to neatly fit its payment service with eBay's auctions, without much help from eBay — in fact, with eBay actively trying to replace it with its own BillPoint payment service. In the years since, what has eBay done with PayPal? It's recycled ideas from the Thiel era, and tried to tout them as "innovatons." It has swollen the size of the PayPal unit to some 7,000 employees. ("What do they do?" a former PayPal executive asked me.) And it has leaned on PayPal to mask slow growth in its core business. How much would PayPal be worth now on its own, without eBay's bloated management? Would Amazon.com and Google even be trying to challenge it in the payments business? Perhaps it's a question that shouldn't remain abstract. eBay tried to buy PayPal several times; every time eBay returned to the bargaining table, PayPal's price went up. It finally took the workings of a liquid market to determine PayPal's worth; after PayPal's IPO, eBay had to pay a fair price for the payments company. Yes, it's time for another PayPal IPO. Too bad Peter Thiel isn't available to run the company — he's making far more money on his hedge fund than he ever did from PayPal. (Photo by David Orban)

Ken Layne over at Wonkette has done some heroic digging into Plum Island, the Department of Homeland Security-run animal horror lab suspiciously close not only to Montauk, where our friend Monty washed ashore, but to a long string of terrifying outbreaks and hybrid animal attacks. We knew from the start of the Montauk Monster mystery that Plum Island was at the center of various conspiracy theories, but when one looks at the entire awful history in one blog post, one must inevitably conclude that, despite its shifty and inconsistent denials, the federal government is assembling there a fearsome monster army that, if left unchecked, will someday slaughter us while we sleep.

Ebay is not just for auctioning off books related to obscure literary feuds; it's also a good place for members of the working class to hustle mementos of the humbling moments when celebrities crossed their paths and acted like jerks. One item that you just missed bidding on: a receipt from an Atlanta-area restaurant signed by Outkast rapper Andre 3000. The meal cost $46.01. Andre's tip: $0. But the receipt sold for almost $15, so the waiter came out ahead. That said, let's segue into THIS: a look back at some other fabulous celebrity-related items that appeared on eBay in the recent past:

eBay's second-quarter net income rose 22 percent to $460 million, as PayPal and other newer businesses led broad-based growth. The total value of all goods sold on the site in the quarter was $15.7 billion, up 8 percent from a year ago — which suggests that the sustained whining of smaller sellers who are displeased by the inclusion of listings from the likes of Buy.com, which pays lower fees to sell items on the site, has mattered less than new sales generated by the larger merchants. [Wall Street Journal]

"In a long-awaited decision in a four-year-old trademark lawsuit against eBay brought by the jeweler Tiffany and Company, Judge Richard Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled Monday that the online retailer does not bear a legal responsibility to prevent its users from selling counterfeit items on its marketplace." [New York Times]

Tired of fielding lawsuits from patent trolls and scared of court injunctions like that faced by RIM which nearly shut down the company's BlackBerry service, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson are among the companies rumored to be behind the formation of the Allied Security Trust. Ponying up $250,000 down payments and $5 million in escrow to make purchases, the trust seeks to buy patents before they fall into the hands of patent trolls. (That's the polite name the group's founders use for companies which seek to make money litigating infringers rather than by create products.) But the real bogeyman here is the rise of a possible patent troll to rule all patent trolls, Intellectual Ventures, which has close ties to Microsoft.

Luxury goods manufacturers have been increasingly protective of brands, and Parisian courts have sided with homegrown companies against eBay twice now with a ruling against the online auction site in the amount of €40 million ($63 million) for its role in facilitating the trade in knockoff Louis Vuitton handbags, luggage and other accessories. Christian Dior, another brand owned by Vuitton parent LVMH, had earlier won a small judgment against eBay in French courts for the unauthorized sale of Dior perfumes — the perfumes were real, but were in breach of exclusivity agreements Dior had signed with other retailers.

Ian Usher, the British ex-pat living in Australia who is selling his life on eBay, only has 5 more days with all his stuff. That's when his eBay auction ends and a winning bidder will take over Usher's motorbike, jet ski, bicycle, hobbies, friends, job and lifestyle. The latest bid values it all at $233,000. For pickup only.

When Ian Usher separated from his wife, he figured he might as well walk away from his home, his job, his friends, and all his worldly possessions while he was at it. So he put the whole damn works up for grabs on Ebay and the bidding, which started this morning, is through the roof. "The British immigrant to Australia, who said the trigger for his bold offer was the break-up with his wife, had hoped he would attract a bid of 500,000 dollars (477,000 US). Shortly after the seven-day auction began Sunday, a bid of 300,100 dollars for 44-year-old Ian Usher's Perth-based lifestyle was listed on the Internet auction site eBay. By late afternoon, some 40 bids had been made with the highest offer at 650,000 dollars. 'I brought out the champagne at three o'clock when it passed the 400,000-dollar mark,' Usher told the Australian news agency AAP. 'It's unbelievable that it's going up like this so early in the auction.'"

EBay sellers don't like the fact that buyers can rate them, but they can't rate buyers. Especially since eBay charges sellers with low ratings more. At eBay Live in Chicago, this animosity spilled over as one seller, caught here on video, screamed at eBay employees on stage: "Open your eyes! Nobody's here! You're putting sellers out of business!" The clip, after the jump.

Hookers and eBay, shares and cops. If Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, had an attorney on staff with them, would that have prevented questionable legal moves by the founder and CEO of the world's most reliable housemates and hookups platform?

The acquisition of Skype has been something of an albatross around eBay's neck — what, exactly, does an auction site need voice-over-IP and chat software for? With the new release, it's starting to make a bit more sense. Not as a chat client for early-adopter technology fetishists, but as a telemarketing tool. Here's how!

On eBay, some merchants are now more equal than others. eBay signed up Buy.com to sell on the site with a special deal: no listing fees, a perk which has allowed Buy.com to litter the site with junk listings like a single AA battery — an offering that makes no economic sense under the rules that apply to other eBay sellers. That goes against the site's core principle of a "level playing field," reiterated here by founder Pierre Omidyar, in an interview with current CEO John Donahoe, just two months ago.

Wall Street has long sought an eBay site redesign. Finally, eBay has a plan to get one . The company announced Project Echo, a software platform for third-party developers whom the company hopes will do the heavy lifting to get such a redesign done. "Rather than having eBay try to build every feature, we should open up the platform and integrate others' work," eBay exec Max Mancini told reporters. Project Echo is the perfect name, if only because we've heard all this before.

While the occassional videoblogger might put up sponsorships for sale through eBay's auction site, networks and radio stations weren't so interested, so eBay is cutting its few deals with cable networks loose and ending its partnerships with Bid4Spots in brokering AM and FM ads. Which is a shame, because I was totally going to buy some radio ads right after I purchased some Beanie Babies. [Industry Standard]

An eBay seller going by the handle pseudopr415 is offering 10 Facebook profiles, each with a minimum of 200 friends, for sale in an eBay auction that closes June 14. The seller writes: "I currently am testing the waters, and would like to see if any marketers are interested in using these." Facebook makes a lot of noise about how its users trust the site so much, they'll often supply their cell phone numbers, email and home addresses for their friends and contacts to see. Access to that information could be worth plenty to spammers as well as identity thieves. The product description pseudopr415 created — including a five-step fake profile plan, descriptions of the characters he's created for the 10 profiles and, in case you have any questions, an email to contact the sneaky bastard — below:

Click to viewBenchmark-backed Glassdoor.com popped out of stealth mode as a site that lets users find out what employees think of their employers. As a part of the ratings, company CEO's get a grade. Some, such as Cisco's John T. Chambers and Apple's Steve Jobs fared very well — coming away with 93 percent and 95 percent approval ratings. Others, including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, did not. The ten worst-rated CEO's and what employees told Glassdoor they think about them, below.

Developers who jumped on the Google App Engine bandwagon have gotten an unpleasant surprise. Those who create Web applications using Google's computing infrastructure have found that the Mountain View advertising broker is not-so-subtly asking them to use Google Checkout to accept payments and not rival online transaction processing PayPal, an eBay subsidiary. Valid PayPal domains "accidentally" got caught up in Google's anti-phishing efforts, according to Googler Marzia Niccolai.

Yahoo, IAC and eBay are in for rough sailing, but Google and Amazon.com should cruise smoothly and emerge as the big winners in the coming years, according to analyst Jeffrey Lindsay of Wall Street research firm Sanford C. Bernstein in a 310-page report published yesterday titled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning." Tellingly, there's no mention in the summary article of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a totes awesome IPO. [Reuters]