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Just 24 hours after divesting itself of StumbleUpon, eBay is making a much bigger but much anticipated move: announcing plans to spin-off Skype as its own, public company. According to eBay, the IPO will “be completed in the first half of 2010.”

The news follows recent rumors that Skype’s founders were attempting to put together an investment group to buy back the company from eBay. That plan appears to have never materialized, as eBay is instead opting to take Skype to the public markets.

On its own, Skype is a quickly growing company, though, that growth has slowed somewhat in recent months as the Internet telephone service has run into the laws of large numbers. In total, there are currently more than 400 million Skype users, and the company generated $551 million in revenue in 2008.

Much like StumbleUpon, Skype didn’t really fit into eBay’s main businesses – auctions and payments (PayPal) – and the company has acknowledged as such for some time. The company’s CEO, John Donahoe, reiterated that again in today’s announcement, saying “it’s clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal. We believe operating Skype as a stand-alone publicly traded company is the best path for maximizing its potential.”

Ultimately, the Skype IPO, when it happens, will be a hugely important event for the Web world, and potentially pave the way for IPOs of other quickly growing companies like Facebook. However, much of how it will be received will depend on issues outside of Skype’s control – like the rebound (or lack thereof) of the global economy and stock market.

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Over the past few weeks I have been reading a book called Twitter Power byJoel Comm. As many of you know I am not a big fan of books, but I have to say it is one of my favorite books. Even though I already know a lot about social media it made me think about Twitter in a new way. Here are a few things I learned:

Get Started the Right Way

When I started using Twitter, I went about it the wrong way. My user name wasn’t my name and I tried to create a profile that wasn’t tied to my company or me. Because of this no one really paid attention to my Twitter profile and cared about what I tweeted. So if you are new to Twitter, make sure your profile represents you.

On top of that you need to make your profile is inviting. For example you want to use a picture of yourself and design your profile instead of just using the generic designs Twitter gives you. And when doing so make sure you take into account colors, because you don’t want it to be too distracting and causes people to ignore your tweets.

Building a Following

When you first sign up for Twitter there are two ways you can get followers. The first is the quantity route and the second is the quality route. If you go for the quantity route you can do a few things:

• Look for people you already know.
• Tweet your blog, so every time you write a blog posts it goes to Twitter. You also want to make sure your twitter profile is linked to from your blog.
• Offer your followers freebies and gifts. The more you offer to them, the more people will follow you. A good way to do this is through contests.
• Every time someone tweets you, make sure you respond to them.
• Put your Twitter name in your email signature.

If you are looking to get quality users, you can:

• Identify and follow the experts in your industry.
• Gain people’s friendship by doing things such as replying to their tweets.
• Always give more than you take by doing things such as giving other people advice and when they ask for it.

The Art of Tweeting

As you probably already know, I don’t tweet too often. I have only made a few hundred tweets in a year to 2 years. After reading Twitter Power, I finally understood how I should be tweeting.

• Follow Twitter etiquette. For example you never want to spam (which I have done), you want to give credits when retweeting, and most importantly you want to stick with 140 characters (don’t create multiple tweets to get across a message).
• You want to join the conversation. I always just tweeted what I wanted, but my profile never grew. The main reason for this is because I never joined the conversation and contributed to it.
• Make sure you are interesting on Twitter. If you want to tweet crap, that’s fine, but you will probably gain a lot more followers if you are interesting.

Conclusion

There is a lot more great information that you can learn by reading Twitter Power. I personally loved it so much that I recommend you get out there right now and buy a copy. If you don’t you will regret it!

By the way, you should also Twitter about Twitter Power.

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While it is hard to argue that Twitter is merely a fad and will soon blow over, we are beginning to see signs that opinion-polarizing micro-blogging service’straffic may have peaked. As if that news wasn’t bad enough, now it appearsthat the 19 million member strong social networking site Facebook may put an end to Twitter.

Facebook made some changes to the way they display users’ statuses on their site on Friday. All three of the changes are very important because they are directly targeted towards micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaikuwhich have garnered a lot of attention and have developed a loyal following in the past few months.

The first change on the list is a newly created page that aggregates the status updates of all your friends (need to be logged in to see). One look at this page and you can clearly see the similarities between this and the previously mentioned services.

The second change is the ability to subscribe to the status updates of any of your friends via an RSS reader, or via SMS. You can collectively subscribe to the updates of all your friends by going to the ‘posted items’ page, clicking on ‘my friends’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posted items’. And conversely, you can subscribe to any one friend’s updates by going to that friend’s ‘posted items’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posts’ from there.

The third and most important update is the ability to post status updates from your cell phone to your Facebook status page.

Given Facebook’s generally liberal stance on their open API I have no doubt that developers will come up with a similar arsenal of tools that currently exist for Twitter-like services, rendering them largely superfluous. This instance, coupled with Google’s recent move to replicate StumbleUpon does make me wonder more about the perils of developing any new service right now.

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