A Step Back From the Web

The Web leaders -- including Yahoo, Amazon.com, Google and eBay -- have opened their code to developers who want to create applications that blend content from different sites. That has spurred hundreds of do-it-yourself programmers to pull and merge data from sites in creative ways.

HousingMaps ( http://www.housingmaps.com/ ), for example, displays houses listed for rent on Craigslist on maps yanked from Google. Similarly, Chicagocrime.org plots crime reports from the Chicago Police Department's online database onto a map of Chicago delivered by Google.

The Web's top sites also are buying start-ups like crazy again. This week, Web auction giant eBay announced that it would buy Internet phone pioneer Skype Technologies SA for $2.6 billion -- a whopper of a price for a tiny money-loser that collected only $7 million in revenue last year.

But eBay executives are as shrewd as they are bold. They seem willing to do what it takes to stay on the fast-changing frontier of how people and companies use the Web, so you can bet the Skype deal foreshadows key changes in online commerce and advertising.

EBay already said it will not only continue offering Skype as a stand-alone product -- one with the potential to grow into a major telecom business -- but also hopes to use it to move into advertising. EBay dipped a big toe in those waters this summer when it bought comparison-shopping guide Shopping.com for $635 million. Now eBay says Skype will power a new pay-per-call ad service in which merchants will be charged a small fee each time a customer clicks on a Skype button beside their listing to call that merchant.

It is never easy to predict what will happen next online, especially with every new technology and service being shaped by users. But the Internet has continued to dazzle us for the seven straight years since I left washingtonpost.com to launch this column.

Now I have decided to take a brief break from my Internet commentary; this will be my last ".com" until the end of the year. I hope that standing back from the Internet, if only for a few months, won't be like ripping away one of my senses. Regardless, I have no doubt the show will be every bit as wild when I return in January.

Leslie Walker's e-mail address iswalkerl@washpost.com.