Now I can see it happening

When eBay bought Skype last year for $4B, the key word in their business justification seemed to be the potential that Skype had for strenghtening the eBay community.

I didn't get it back then. I didn't get it up until 10 minutes ago. Yeah, yeah.. sure I could think about some value added on cheap calls between members, or "call me on skype" as part of the courting involved in the commercial transaction.

IMHO, the sense of "community" was felt much stronger in the case of bloggers. If you are reading a book (like Gladwell's BLINK or THE TIPPING POINT), when you jump to his blog you get the sense of almost real time interaction with a person that you were already "talking to"(in that steady continuous pace that reading a book implies).. that that real time interaction had the sense of community building around a topic.

A more recent case came to me on wednesday, when reading "An Army of Davids" from Glenn Reynolds and finding his comments pretty much real time on the web on immigration and AMLO (aka El Peje) in Mexico: the conversation CONTINUED, the community was formed around a specific interest.

But now I get in on eBay and Skype!!. I found out few minutes ago aboug Skypecasts.
All you need in Skype in your PC/Mac and be connected and:
- 4 hours and 23 minutes from now you can attend the Skypecast on "Network neutrality"
- 5 hours from now "European Citizen's Band Federation Congress Warsawa 21 October 2006"

that is really a community use (around a specific interest). kudos to eBay on that!