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Between them, Gigaom and Techcrunch have pretty much nailed down the fact that eBay is looking to acquire the social bookmarking tool StumbleUpon for $40-$45 million. AOL and Google have also been mentioned as potential buyers in the past. So far, the site has taken only a $1.5 million seed round. That's about all the info we have.
StumbleUpon, you may know, is a browser toolbar that lets you rate sites with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". The more sites you rate, the more StumbleUpon learns about you, meaning that the sites it "stumbles" are closely matched to your interests based on the sites approved by people like you.
At first glance, this seems a bit like the Skype buy: eBay snapping up something that has no obvious relationship to its core business. What have auctions and online payments got to do with site recommendations? Some ideas:
1. Ability to put eBay/Skype in the browser. There's already an eBay toolbar, but the penetration seems low.
2. Product recommendations. Maybe they want to beat Amazon's recommendation engine, and SU could provide data.
3. Similar to recommendations: social shopping (ie. a place for people to note down the stuff they want to buy). That said, there are more obvious choices if eBay wants to get into social shopping and bookmarking - Kaboodle, for instance.
4. Similar to Amazon's use of Alexa (traffic driver, buzz builder, puts Amazon in browser): Amazon is a bookstore, remember? But they're not afraid of diversification.
5. Traffic stats.
6. Buying eBay users (seems a little pricey for around 2 million users)
7. Long shot - community. We know that eBay wants to build a social network to establish more trust between buyers and sellers (and, in fact, they've already built the tech). It's vaguely possible that they would buy a social network to do that, but it's almost impossible to imagine any deep integration between the two.
8. Stumble PayPal accounts to find people making similar transactions (kidding!)