We got a tip that the San Jose location of Spoons, a favored happy-hour spot across the street from eBay's headquarters, was getting purchased by Hooters. An eBayer attending CES acknowledged this last night, but wouldn't confirm the other half of the tip: that eBay CEO Meg Whitman had gone to the city council, asking them to stop the sale. She must not like hot wings. Fortunately for eBay's owl-eyed employees, the changeover seems to be going on despite any of Whitman's efforts. (Photo by PunkJr)

eBay is experimenting with cutting fees to list items for sale, a marked change from its history of price hikes. "We've not ever really decreased price, and it is possible that by decreasing price, we actually increase the revenues and vibrancy of this market in such a way that this price decrease is self-liquidating," said CEO Meg Whitman. Translation: The competitive threat from Amazon.com and Google is increasing. [AuctionBytes]

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Special correspondent Paul Boutin is reporting by text message, which is fitting, since apparently this morning's keynotes from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and eBay's Meg Whitman can easily be condensed into a Twitter. Or less. Conference organizer Tim O'Reilly, in fact, has all the good lines. O'Reilly to Whitman: "You become what you disrupt." He means, Boutin texts, that eBay is now the old guard waiting to be Napstered. That's also evident in a following exchange, where O'Reilly points out that you can't Skype people by clicking from a Facebook page or using an email address. Whitman's only response is that it's easy to look up people in Skype's directory. Meg, it's time you had a chat with Mark.

We'd hardly blame Meg Whitman if, after this week, she decided to hang up on the phone business altogether. On Monday eBay said they were taking a $1.4 billion charge related to their acquisition of VOIP startup Skype. On Tuesday, we noted that one of Whitman's major goals in buying Skype, bolstering its auction business in China, where rivals were using click-to-call features on their auctions to close sales, has turned into a complete failure. And then, yesterday, things somehow managed to get worse.

In Kara Swisher's otherwise excellent analysis on AllThingsD of the Skype writeoff's effect on Facebook, there's a string of nonsense that desperately bears correction. Swisher ramblingly suggests that eBay bought Skype for some kind of ability to target ads and premium offerings to the VOIP service's users. Nonsense. It's well-documented that eBay CEO Meg Whitman got the idea on a trip to China, where she saw that users of rival auction sites were using VOIP calls and instant messaging to close sales — a useful feature in a country still getting used to conducting business electronically, rather than face to face. Adding Skype to eBay's auctions in China, she hoped, would boost its market share. No such luck.

Amazon.com has, as expected, revealed the details of its new payment service in a lengthy, meandering blog post. Don't bother reading it: The geeks in Seattle take forever to get to the very sharp point. The short version? Jeff Bezos is planning to plunge a long knife right into the heart of eBay CEO Meg Whitman's most important growth business, PayPal. Here's the secret of how the eBay-owned payments service mints money — and how Amazon.com's founder is crafting a boldly savage plan to gut it.

In yesterday's earnings call, eBay CEO Meg Whitman's comments on her company's relationship with Google sound like every codependent couple we know: They'll last forever, sparring all the while, or end disastrously. In the meantime, each partner will use every opportunity to chew your ear off about the other partner, hoping to gain leverage over the other in their petty, public battles. And if things get ugly? They'll just pretend they don't even exist:

Poor, deluded Meg Whitman. The eBay CEO is so out of touch with her customers' discontent that she brags to Bloomberg News about this fact: Less than half of the users of PayPal, eBay's online-checkout service, think it's "good." Granted, Google Checkout, the search engine's rival payment product, comes off less well. But Whitman should be distraught, not gleeful, at such low customer-satisfaction scores.

What do you get for your hard work as a Valley executive? Loads of perks, and the Mercury News sifted through SEC filings to find the details. Top recipient was Larry Ellison, who received $1.8M from Oracle to beef up his home security. Also of note: eBay spent $774K on Meg Whitman's travel and another $231K to cover the travel taxes. [Mercury News]

CONFONZ — Waaaaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of a San jose Mercury news story on from Tuesday mentioned that Wonkette's favorite Walnuts! candidate, John McCain is visiting Google today. A shiny new dime to the first person to point us at the photos. A shiny new quarter to the first person to paste up some McCain search queries! After the jump, we lead you on with a photo of Mitt Romney, Steve Jurvetson, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Meg Whitman of EBay.

NICK DOUGLAS — There are plenty of reasons for Silicon Valley to lean left. Silicon Valley is just south of San Francisco, home of liberal Congresswoman Nancy "Palomino" Pelosi. Techies are young, idealistic, and progressive. Their votes and their money end up with the Democrats.

The Microsoft-eBay merger rumors are true. EBay has the power here, or at least Microsoft thinks so. They spun Bill Gates' (pictured, duh) retirement as his chance to fully run his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The president of a major web company tells the Wag:

1. EBay CEO Meg Whitman is reportedly getting a divorce. No word on whether we should care, or whether she got a solid prenup.