Selling friendships on Facebook for businesses

An Australian businessman accused of selling "friends" from the social networking site Facebook hit back Friday, saying it would be "very difficult" to stop him.

Facebook warned Thursday that members who bought information from the Australian online marketing company uSocial.net could be banned from the site.

Leon Hill, 24, who founded and owns uSocial.net, agreed that his customers could be breaching Facebook's terms of service -- but added that Facebook was almost powerless to stop him.

He said Facebook would be "well within their rights" to ban its members who accepted uSocial.net's offer but that it "would be almost impossible to track what we're doing."

Hill's Brisbane-based firm this week angered Facebook by offering to sell a user 1,000 friends for 177 US dollars and 5,000 friends -- the limit imposed by Facebook on a standard profile account -- for 654 dollars.

Facebook "fan" pages have no limits and uSocial.net said it could supply 1,000 Facebook fans for 177 dollars and 10,000 fans for 1,167 dollars.

Likening his service to a dating agency, Hill said his company manually scrolled through Facebook's millions of pages for users who had listed an interest in or already had links to a particular client's industry.

For example, he said they trawled Facebook on behalf of a dealer in performance car parts to find people with an interest in the automotive industry, who were then sent a friend request or fan suggestion.

"We don't manipulate accounts at all," he said. "We are targeting people for our clients but at the end of the day it's all up to the end user," he said.

Hill said his company did the same thing with microblogging site Twitter, which he said had tried unsuccessfully to stop its members using uSocial.net.

"In the end the thing is that I'm not actually ever doing anything against the terms of service -- it's the actual users who purchases my services (who is)," he said.

"Unless they actually say anything, unless they make it known to Facebook or Twitter that they've actually bought my services, there's absolutely nothing they (Facebook or Twitter) can do."

US online giant eBay to sell Skype: report

US online auction giant eBay will announce Tuesday a plan to sell its Web communication service Skype to an investment group, The New York Times reported.

The group of private investors would likely include Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm headed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, the newspaper said, citing two people briefed on eBay's plans.

London-based venture capital firm Index Ventures, an early investor in Skype, and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners were also involved in the arrangement, whose value was not disclosed.

But the Times noted that eBay has said it wants about two billion dollars for Skype, which could take in over $600 million in revenue this year.

eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for a price tag that eventually exceeded $3.1 billion, including payouts to Web entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark, who founded the company in 2003.

But eBay found it difficult to integrate the company with its core auction business and later wrote down $900 million of Skype's value.

The auction company said in April it had planned an initial public offering for the Skype division next year, but the Times noted eBay has since been in talks with companies and investment groups interested in making the purchase.

Last month, eBay negotiated with Internet giant Google over Skype, which bypasses the standard telephone network by channeling voice and video calls over the Web, the newspaper said. But Google walked away from the deal.

Since the sale to eBay, the number of Skype users has exploded from 53 million to 405 million. Skype allows users to call each other free of charge and to connect with land lines or mobile devices at low rates.