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Leading VoIP service Skype goes from strength to strength, with revenues rising by 26 per cent last quarter. Yet despite this success, parent company eBay is rumoured to be looking to offload its cash-cow to none other than Google.

The rumours seem credible when you consider that eBay’s latest financial results were pretty poor (revenue down 7 per cent to $2.04bn), well below the market expectations for what is traditionally retail’s busiest quarter.

No eBay/Skype synergy

“Even eBay has now admitted that its $2.6bn purchase of Skype in 2005 was too much. With still no logical integration between the telephony service and the auction site, speculation over a potential sale is again intensifying,” says Jemima Kiss in The Guardian.

According to The Times, eBay’s Chief Executive, John Donahoe, told analysts earlier this month that: “synergies between Skype and the other parts of our portfolio are minimal.” He also said that Skype is “a great standalone business”.

The Times report mentions US telcos AT&T and Verizon as potential buyers, while Jemima Kiss speculates in The Guardian that: “Google was rumoured to be interested as far back at November 2007, and that would fit with just one of the many pies in which Google has its fingers.”

TechRadar has contacted Skype’s UK press office for further information on this story, so stay tuned for updates.

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Dave Winer over at Scripting News today is experimenting with something that may very well become the next generation of Twitter.

In its current state, the Twitter platform is so easy to imitate that the service is seeing more and more competition. First of all there’s Jaiku which has most of the essential features of Twitter, an implicit endorsement from Leo Laporte, and more. And then there is Facebook which also added Twitter-like functionality a few months ago (which of course becomes instantaneously available to a community of over 22 million and growing at a feverish pace). If Twitter is to survive in this hostile environment it has to add new and unique features (preferably also harder to copy) and do it fast.

One recommendation in this regard comes from Dave, who while thinking of new kinds of Twitters, came up with the idea of a TwitterGram, where you record a thought, upload it somewhere and use the 140 characters allotted to you by Twitter to link to the audio message which is restricted to 200K. Just like what Twitter did with blogging, TwitterGrams aims to do this for Podcasting. And everyone that wants to respond to your TwitterGram does the same, uploads an audio message somewhere and links to it from their own Twitter profile.

The idea is definitely not new and to an extent has been implemented byMySay. The problem with MySay is that you actually have to call their service to record an audio message and even then there is no easy way to integrate it with Twitter. If Dave can create an interface and a web service (which seems to be underway) that can make the entire process easy for the end-user and take care of the audio hosting and Twitter integration, the idea could definitely catch on and in my eyes would definitely be better than Twitter itself

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Yuwie is a relatively new social networking site and has really taken off. The site doesn’t differentiate itself with the features it offers or the market that it trying to capture. On the contrary, Yuwie differentiates itself by paying its members for using the site for every action they take on the site, and even the actions resulting from them.

Once you sign up with the site, you have several different options accessible via icons displayed on the left-hand side.

These options include messages, friends, pictures, blog, schools, clubs, and favorites. As you can see, nothing new there, in fact these same features and many more are already available on other sites, but that’s not the point. Yuwie has a detailed set of videos that explains how they are ‘changing the game’ by paying their users for ‘playing around on the internet’. So how exactly are they changing the game? Let’s see.

Why do I get paid?

Yuwie argues that others social networking sites are making an estimated $20 million a month while the users do all the work (social media ain’t it?) and that unlike these other sites, they want to share there revenue with the users.

What do I get paid for?

You get paid for every action you take on the site. Every change you make to your profile, every picture/blog/video you post, and not only that, you get paid for every time another user looks at your profile or content that you have created or posted. On the 15th of each month, Yuwie decides (based on how much they made in the previous month) how much will be given out to each user, an amount that you can track from the ‘earnings’ section of your profile.

The revenue share rate for the month of August was $0.47 per thousand views.

How much money can I make?

While the amount of you make depends on how much you interact with the site, here is a look at sample earnings based on the 10 levels of referrals and assuming a revenue-sharing rate of $0.50.

Seems like a great idea. With most of the features of your average social networking site offered on Yuwie and the added benefit of getting paid to do what you’re already doing, does the prospect of making money while making friends seem enticing?

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