I am predicting that ebay will use skype client for personalization and notification.

• ebay and Skype combined has the technology to build a multi-purpose network to handle the dialogue between ebay and its user community. I would go one step further and extend it to provide a powerful tool for people to set up dialogue between potential buyers/sellers. The dialogue will enable ebay to help users to judge the identity of the person (perceptions about other party).
• It will also be the engine that can be used to create negotiation framework (even though negotiations are not allowed in a true spirit of ‘auction’)
• The merger with skype also means that there will be addition in ebay users worldwide.
• The technology will offer another revenue generation tool for PC to phone network. However, the question really is whether Skype will exist as we know today.

Apart from other things, I am very interested in knowing how ebay goes about handling merger issues – given that ebay’s success totally hinges around success to leverage user’s identity data.