The big news of the day appears to be eBay acquiring StumbleUpon. A fair question is to ask why. To me it doesn't really make sense.
Om Malik at GigaOM has an interesting take though
By marrying the [StumbleUpon] toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take.
I haven't used Skype so I couldn't comment on whether this would be a workable strategy but I do know that I have never used StumbleUpon for search. If I want to search for something I generally use google. If I want to kill 5 minutes I use the StumbleUpon toolbar.
If eBay genuinely was looking to get into the search business then this deal doesn't really make sense to me. Especially with technorati
flaunting its statistical finery.
The second part of this news story is the
response of google. Supposedly a potential suitor for StumbleUpon until very recently google has released a new feature for the Google Toolbar, on the same day as the acquisition, which closely resembles the StumbleUpon functionality.
With Microsoft complaining about Google acquiring DoubleClick and demanding an anti-trust investigation
after presumably being priced out of the running itself and now the response of Google to the acquisition of StumbleUpon does anyone else feel that the big players have abandoned the idea of innovation and decided just to squabble amongst themselves? Their conduct seems to be increasingly petty.
