The Social

eBay wants to spin off telephony service Skype into a separate publicly traded company, but something's standing in the way: Skype's founders are threatening to take back some of the technology amid a licensing dispute.

The auction giant's solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: build a new one.

This was revealed in a 10-Q regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; eBay is not commenting beyond the filing. You can decide whether "Frankenskype" or "Skypenstein" is a better name for the hypothetical creation.

Here's what has happened: Skype's founders have established a company called Joltid Ltd., which still owns the rights to some of Skype's technology. Joltid has made the accusation that eBay doesn't have the right to do everything it wants with all of Skype's code as a result; eBay is suing Joltid to get that technology back. (Is this like the Silicon Valley equivalent of body-snatching?) But the catch is that the trial isn't scheduled until next June, which could put a big roadblock in the way of eBay's plans for a Skype IPO.

So that's why eBay is working on a total rebuild of Skype's software.

There is, however, this little issue. "The new software will be expensive and might not work," Bloomberg's article summarized. "The company said it might have to shut down Skype if the dispute with the founders isn't resolved."

eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion, but it hasn't proven to be the best fit for the company. Rumors circulated that it was looking to sell Skype, possibly to Google, but then opted to take the company public instead.

Download Skype for Windows | Mac | iPhone | Windows Mobile from CNET Download.com.

This post was updated at 9:45am EDT with comment from Google.

Will eBay sell Skype to Google?

It's no secret that many in Silicon Valley regard eBay's 2005 acquisition of the telephony service as a $2.6 billion misstep. But new rumors, reported late Tuesday night on TechCrunch, suggest that eBay may be negotiating Skype-related partnerships with Google or even selling it outright.

"We do not comment on market rumor or speculation regarding acquisitions," a Google representative told CNET News.com in an e-mail. "Generally speaking we are constantly in discussions about potential partnerships in cases that will be mutually beneficial for users, advertisers, and publishers." Representatives from Skype were not immediately available for comment.

There was very little detail to the rumors, except that Google's "core team" for voice operations is reported to be suspiciously absent from this week's CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas. So at this point, it seems to be Valley gossip at its finest.

But a Google-owned Skype would make a whole lot of sense. Google already operates a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service through its Google Talk messaging client and purchased communication management start-up GrandCentral last year. With its open-source initiatives like Android for mobile phones (especially considering Skype's vocal desire to make a splash in the mobile market) and OpenSocial for social networks, Google would be in a much more ideal position than eBay to turn Skype into a "hackable," developer-friendly product.

Henry Blodget of the Silicon Alley Insider figured that Skype could sell for as much as $5 billion to $6 billion.

And while Skype may have seemed like a sweet buy for eBay back in 2005, a $900 million write-down and a CEO resignation later, eBay is in a tight spot, and the Skype purchase has likely grown a little sour.

eBay announced Monday that it has appointed new CEOs to its Skype and Shopping.com properties. At the helm of telephony company Skype will be current Shopping.com president and former Evite co-founder and CEO Josh Silverman; taking his place at Shopping.com will be Andre Haddad, who joined eBay in 2001 when it acquired his start-up, the European marketplace site iBazar.

This continues an extensive management shakeup at the online commerce giant, which saw the departure of longtime CEO Meg Whitman in January. eBay itself has been going through some tough times, with seller dissatisfaction leading to a boycott over fee hikes and new rules.

Meanwhile, many questioned whether Skype was a smart acquisition for eBay in the first place when the company disclosed a $1.4 billion write-down last year to handle Skype-related charges. Skype also suffered a two-day outage in the summer of 2007.

Silverman will replace interim Skype CEO Michael van Swaaij, who was appointed to the post in October when co-founder Niklas Zennstrom (now at the helm of Joost) left the post amid the $1.4 billion snafu.

MySpace and Skype are set to announce on Wednesday that the eBay-owned telephony client will be providing voice chat services for the News Corp.-owned social network's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Through this deal, MySpace users will be able to link their profiles to Skype accounts, and will be able to place voice chat calls through the MySpaceIM client or the Skype client to both Skype and MySpace members--but if your MySpace profile is set to "private," you will be exempt from calls from people who aren't on your friends list. The service will be available in the 20 countries where MySpace has "localized communities."

A joint release for the two companies emphasized the sheer number of users that this will encompass: "With more than 110 million monthly active MySpace users and 220 million Skype registered users around the world, this partnership connects two of the most popular communications platforms on the Internet to create the world's largest online, voice-connected community."

But at the same time, only 25 million out of MySpace's 110 million active users have downloaded the MySpaceIM client. And neither company is at the top of its game. MySpace still leads the social-networking field in membership and traffic, but has lost its place in the spotlight to fast-growing rival Facebook. And Skype hasn't exactly turned out to be a real winner for eBay, with some critics saying that the two are mismatched.

Presumably, this will be the "MySpace announcement" that is rumored to take place Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. It was originally thought that this announcement would unveil a developer platform for MySpace akin to Facebook's, but credible sources quickly began to hint to multiple news outlets, including CNET News.com, that this would not be the case--a source for gossip blog Valleywag, in fact, indicated that the announcement would deal with the MySpaceIM client.

Who needs downloads? Not instant-messaging fans, apparently, according to Nielsen NetRatings. The online division of the legendary statistics-crunching company just released a study that tracks the fastest-growing instant-messaging software products from August 2006 to June 2007, and the results indicate that Web-based is the way to go.

Meebo's Ajaxy prettiness

(Credit: Meebo)

The most rapidly growing IM client, according to the study, is Meebo, which launched just over a year ago. The fact that it's so new may be partially responsible for its rapid growth--354 percent from August 2006 to June 2007. But Meebo also packs a double punch: not only is it Web-based and offers embed features so that you can literally IM from your blog, but it's also a "universal IM" service that can aggregate your buddy lists from AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. Desktop-based universal IM clients like Trillian and Adium might not be growing as quickly as Meebo is, but they nevertheless continue to spread as people realize that having one buddy list open is a lot easier than two or three.

Additionally, Meebo received some more buzz when it launched media-rich, embeddable chat rooms this spring.

The second-fastest-growing client, according to the study, may be riding the wave of novelty--it's Imvu, a downloadable client that specializes in 3D avatar chat that's not unlike Second Life; according to the study, it's grown 154 percent over the past 10 months. In third place, with 149 percent growth, is Google Talk--another service that's grown thanks to Web-based use, as it's integrated directly into the Gmail home page.

After those three, the fourth and fifth in Nielsen NetRatings' top five showed a significant drop in growth--Paltalk, which specializes in video chat (and is headquartered in my hometown of NYC) was listed as having 26 percent growth, and Skype's integrated IM was in fifth place with 20 percent.