GigaOM

Anyone who has closely watched eBay, the giant online auctioneer, knows that their sellers don’t need them as much as they once used to, mostly because of contextual and performance based advertising. A retailer looking to acquire customers doesn’t need big marketplaces, because Google Adwords (and other such tools) do a pretty good job of directing buyers their way. And cheaper!

And like the Bird Flu, this disease known as the bigmarketplaceinitis, is now spreading to Amazon.com. On Thursday, the Seattle-based e-tail giant lost another third-party vendor, Borders, which is going to try its hand at online retail on its own. Last year, Amazon.com lost another key vendor – Toys’R'Us.

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The meaty part of this latest move against the free-caller operations (which AP didn’t quite explain in its just-the-facts-ma’am report) is AT&T’s claim that it can prove one of the newest defendants falsified call-traffic statistics in order to help set higher interconnect rates. More Friday after we dig through the 34-page filing.

A few months ago we had heard some rumblings that Stoke CEO Randall Kruep was on his way out of the company. Kruep, whom we got to know well when he was running Procket Networks, assured us himself that he was going nowhere.

A couple of weeks later the networking start-up announced a big round of funding, taking the total to about $50 million from investors like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

A surprise awaited us when we check the Stoke management page, following an anonymous tip. Kruep is listed as a founder, but not as the CEO. Instead, the management page points out that Dennis Barsema, a director is now the acting CEO. We wonder what changed between the time when Kruep gave us his assurance and now. Curious, don’t you think.

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A social network like MySpace can help you express yourself and communicate. A bookmarking tool like del.icio.us can help you save and share stuff. A wiki can harness teamwork to build a webpage about whatever it is you care about.

But these social, accessible, dare-I-say-web-2.0 tools can be brought to another level to enable you to make something you can bring back to your offline life. Then they’re not just social, but collaboratively creative. Think Ze Frank’s the ORG or Instructables or Tabblo, which was bought by HP today.

Here are a couple examples. Their user bases are relatively small, but I’d like to think that their utility will give them lasting appeal, especially on a mainstream level.

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Wi-Fi mesh makers are turning to Google Earth for an added birds-eye view of networks. Why? Mesh creators can use hardware and software from companies like Strix and SkyPilot to obtain location and operational data of network nodes, and create useful maps using Google Earth. DIY mesh builders go have some LBS fun. (Photos below the fold.)

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• WebWorkerDaily: 18 tips to trick out your Google Calendar
• NewTeeVee: Neokast: P2P: Streaming for Everyone?
• NewTeeVee: Viacom, Universal want viral love, or not
• NewTeeVee: Killing YouTube, one joint venture at a time. Right! It is actually good.
• GigaGamez: PS3, not exactly a Mercedes, Sony backtracks
• NewTeeVee: Apple TV, a game changer?
• GigaGamez: This video game thing, bigger than we thought.

Motorola needs to get someone to write a book about them, outlining their successes and their mistakes. And devote an entire chapter on why they shouldn’t rely on a single product too much. Remember the Startec? Well that phone sold like mad, and then suddenly it didn’t and Motorola stock swooned.

History is repeating itself with RAZR, which has been milked to death, and the sales have just nose-dived, which is why the company is reporting losses and is bracing for dismal times ahead.

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Now this is one Web 2.0 acquisition that makes sense! Hewlett-Packard has acquired Tabblo, Massachusetts-based company that makes it easier for consumers to upload and printing their photos from the web. Think of Tabblo as iPhoto rest of us - allowing folks to print their photos as calendars or albums, layered with all sorts of social web features.

It was only in May 2006, I was introduced to Tabblo founder Antonio Rodriguez by Jason Shellen, formerly of Blogger/Pyra Labs and then with Google. Ten months later his start=up has been acquired for undisclosed amount of money. Why did that happen? They made a tool that incorporated the best of social web and built a layer of usefulness on top of that. And focused their product on mainstream users, with one simple message: make your photo printing cool and chic.

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