As it battles competitors like Google and Amazon.com for the hearts and minds of application programmers, eBay this week will hold its biggest annual event for these computer professionals, its 2007 eBay Developers Conference, in Boston. This year the conference"s theme is to "bring eBay anywhere." The focus will be on motivating developers to build applications that extend eBay"s e-commerce services to third-party Web sites and new hardware devices.
This emphasis shows that eBay, like other Internet companies, acknowledges it needs to adapt to a new world in which millions of people publish blogs and contribute to Web sites with text, photos and videos. With people devoting significant portions of their online time to maintaining and reading blogs, uploading and viewing videos, and posting and rating news articles, eBay must take its e-commerce services wherever users gather.