A rumor is brewing that eBay is in talks to acquire StumbleUpon (SU).

Long time readers might recall SU was something I thought Microsoft would have been smart to buy. Of course Microsoft isn’t going to listen to me and instead eBay might take the torch. Unlike Skype which didn’t really make that much sense for eBay, Stumbleupon could be baked into Skype which I like. Also stumbling related auctions which eBay would like. This match is good for all camps if the deal goes through.

Also the price which Techcrunch is reporting could be in the $40-70 million range and GigaOm thinks it is $40-45 million. Om Malik also is thinking along a Skype + SU sweet union:

By marrying the toolbar to Skype client, eBay can do an end run around Google’s dominance of the search business. A simple search box inside Skype client is all it would take. It is not that far fetched: Skype has been slowly integrating various different services (including PayPal) into its client, and slowly becoming eBay’s desktop backdoor.

Meanwhile I just reinstalled the Google toolbar to try out their new dice function. The dice is based on search history and tries to present results it thinks you might like. If this is some kind of attempt to compete with StumbleUpon — and I don’t think it is — it’s a very, very early effort. I’m not going to bash Google on it though because they’ve fooled me with lackluster features before (Google Reader) only to improve on them greatly over time when they got more serious about it. Also, related searches have been a part of Google search trends for awhile and there is only an empty space where any comparative SU socially related searches would reside.

With all the data Google has been acquiring on my search history they could do a good job of matching me up with other like-minded searches without the need for all the thumbs up and thumbs down. I’d like to see Google work more at that and I think that’s where they’re headed.

There are some also rans trying to break into the serendipitous surfing ring too. Most likely none of these will dent StumbleUpon or Google. Wouldn’t shock me to see Microsoft try to jump in too late, as usual. This hasn’t been a sprint SU, it’s been a marathon. I got on board with them in January 2004 and they had been around awhile before that.

Good move for eBay, if they pull the trigger.

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