I like the feel of the eBay Developers Conference this year. It’s about value and innovation. Gone are the flashy, big spending advertisers in matching branded shirts. Present are the great minds who build tools and businesses with their bare hands.

What would we do without Ina Steiner from Auction Bytes? We’d be completely in the dark on eBay happenings, that’s what.

Everyone’s a friend at the Dev Conf.

I’m going to eBay Live! on Saturday with my best friend Roxy to see Chris Isaak. I’ve never stayed until the last day before but I’ve heard great things about the food.

The big eBay announcement today was project Echo. It gives solutions providers valuable real estate within eBay’s Selling Manager. It should be in beta released in January. eBay wasn’t clear if they will charge the 3rd party solutions providers for this service.

http://developer.ebay.com/echo/
http://developer.ebay.com/echo/project-echo-brief.pdf

There was a good session from Adam Trachtenberg, the Senior Manager of Platform Evangelism at eBay. He touched on changes to the auction description section and links policy. He said eBay is moving the listing description field to another set of servers and there will be a whitelist of allowed HTML tags. He warned that Javascript and Flash content will be affected. More details will be revealed tomorrow.

After hearing about eBay and PayPal all day, it was refreshing to see Phil from Stylefeeder sitting next to me. I joined Stylefeeder 1 1/2 years ago because it was appealing to the eyes and the brain. Members add their favorite style items for others to view and comment on.

A cool new feature is the Style Twin which finds people with similar taste by processing their searches, ratings and etc. Here’s my top style twin out of 5 pages of twins.

Talk to you tomorrow.