EBay Sees $1 Billion Knocked Off Market Cap; Skype Outages Continue

It was a bad day for stock in general, but eBay had a double whammy.

eBay shares closed down 2.58% (89c) Thursday despite a late rally by NASDAQ listed stocks. The decline knocked $1 billion + off eBay’s market cap and follows a day where the eBay owned VOIP provider Skype remained crippled by a system wide outage.

The Skype outage is now approaching 18 hours (at the time of writing) with little information coming from Skype other than that the issue is related to “sign-on problems.” Skype earlier in the day was forced to deny rumors that their platform had either been hacked or subject to a cyber attack.

Some users have reported intermittent Skype service, with the service connecting then dropping after several minutes.

Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content

TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera makes an interesting observation on the Google News story all over the blogosphere today.

One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.

Google crawls news sites and grabs their content for republishing on Google News. They rely on the willingness of those news sites to get distribution on Google. But Google restricts others from crawling Google News itself via their robots.txt file and terms of use, which state that “you may not…use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the [Google News] Service.”

That policy wasn’t a problem when Google was simply aggregating news from around the web. But now they are hosting original news content, written by people that are involved in the story. And they are telling the world that no one else can crawl that content and display it. Yahoo News, TechMeme and every other non-Google owned news service on the web is restricted from using that content.

The restrictive policy hasn’t changed with the new feature launch, and this may just be an oversight. We’ll find out soon enough if Google intends to build a wall around this news content, or share it with the rest of the web.