eBay Buys StumbleUpon, Just As Google Launches Similar Feature

News broke today that eBay bought StumbleUpon, a website that has a community helping people find new interesting web pages. eBay reportedly paid about $40-45 million for the site, which has become hugely popular lately, beating out Google and AOL. No one really knows why eBay bought it, since it really isn’t their line of work, but somehow they wind up in the talks for every web acquisition. Maybe eBay needs to decide if it is going to be a marketplace or a web giant.
It’s very interesting that this happened the same time as Google released the new Picks For You feature for the Google Toolbar, competing directly with the similar button on Stumble’s toolbar. TechCrunch calls it raining on their parade. According to John Battelle, Google had built an entire DoubleClick killer, ready to launch in case Microsoft or someone else won the […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg