[thelist] AOL and eBay merging??

[William Anderson]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Hill" <lists at prydain.com>
To: "TheList" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2001 2:28 AM
Subject: [thelist] AOL and eBay merging??


> The other night, I was surfing eBay and the UI suddenly changed.
> Above the usual eBay logo was an "AOL Presents:" precursor, and an
> AOL link banner as well.  And the URL had changed to http://ebay.aol.com/.
>
> A little while later, the UI/URL had gome back to the usual eBay style,
> but the ebay.aol.com URL still worked (and still does, as of this
writing).
>
> Neither AOL nor eBay have any press releases regarding a merger, but
> the new UI suggests otherwise.
>
> Am I the only one who saw this, or did I miss a memo?

more than likely, given the aol:// linkage at top and bottom, this is simply
an agreement between eBay and AOL/TW to use the eBay site within AOL,
possibly using direct keyword access to the eBay property (e.g. "use keyword
EBAY to access!" and it'll redirect the AOL browser to the ebay.aol.com
site).  I doubt that AOL/TW have bought eBay.

What's more possible is a merger between eBay and MS, given eBay's heavy
involvement in migrating to the new MS .NET infrastructure ... ebay.msn.com,
anyone?

<tip type="Site Migration">
If you're going to migrate a web property from one place to another, please
try and make sure that you integrate any UI changes as best as you can.
Don't do what MSN did when moving the excellent TerraServer site into the
MSN Home Advisor brand ... and leave your site navigation clumsily shoved
onto the top of every other page ... see http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
for the result
</tip>

--
  ___  ___ __ _________ @well.com  William Anderson - www.well.com/~neuro
 / _ \/ -_) // / __/ _ \|     "All your base are belong to us. You are on
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