eBay Inc

Twitter works great for the "twitterati," but in many ways it has failed to penetrate the mainstream web. For many people who aren't attached to their phones 24/7 or aren't multitasking between work and a stream of micro-thoughts of questionable depth, Twitter is a buzzword, something the media loves to chatter about but signifying nothing.

The clean tech news of the week is going to be dominated by Bloom Energy's emergence from stealth. I can hardly believe that it was almost four years ago that I first wrote about Bloom. Reading that 2006 EcoGeek article, I'm proud to say that we got the broad picture right, but the details are still tantalizing.

By asking what's happening or what's on our minds, Facebook and Twitter have prodded people to broadcast just about anything, from what they ate for lunch to what movie they're going to see. Now a new site wants to unearth more -- by asking people to automatically reveal things they buy.

Blippy, which is backed by a Twitter co-founder, asks people to share their spending habits. If you register a credit card with the site, every transaction bought on the card would be displayed to your friends on Blippy.

Google Inc., the Internet's most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web's most-read sites.

The donation announced Wednesday matches the largest grant made so far to Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that oversees the 7-year-old Wikipedia. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar also donated $2 million to Wikimedia six months ago through one of his investment arms.

States looking to unload surplus property used to do little more than take out an advertisement in the local newspaper, hang an "Open" sign at a warehouse and set up a cash register.

Not anymore. This spring, Vermont will begin selling its surplus goods on eBay, the online auction site. The goal is to attract more bidders and bring in more revenue to state coffers, says Mark Casey, the state's Surplus Property Programs assistant.

"We can move a lot more stuff," Casey says from his office at the warehouse in the central Vermont town of Waterbury.

A research organization that tries to warn computer users about programs that do sneaky things on their computers has spun off from Harvard University.

StopBadware says it will operate as a standalone nonprofit with funding from Google Inc., eBay Inc.'s PayPal and Mozilla, which makes the Firefox Web browser. It was initially set up as part of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

EBay hopes to lure more sellers by essentially doing away with "listing" fees for people who occasionally auction items on its site. Instead it will take a cut of the final selling price.

EBay has tinkered with its fee structure in recent years in hopes of improving the experience people have on its site and reinvigorating its growth. Changes like the ones being announced Tuesday are meant to encourage more people to list items for sale.

In the highly publicized aftermath of a Microsoft Internet Explorer vulnerability that opened the door for malicious hackers to tap into Google's infrastructure, the search giant on Monday rolled out a new "stable" release of its Google Chrome for Windows. Although the timing of the new release probably isn't connected to the security issues facing IE, Google nonetheless is pressing ahead in its efforts to grab market share from IE and Firefox, the market-leading browsers.

The Federal Communications Commission has a daunting task to complete this spring. The deadline for public comment on the FCC's proposed Net-neutrality rules passed this week, and now the FCC is accepting rebuttals and replies to comments made by Internet companies, industry associations, and government officials.

The proposed Net-neutrality framework or national broadband plan would regulate businesses in an effort to ensure that all people of the U.S. have broadband access. The rule change also means consumers will have more say in which Internet products succeed.

VigLink. It may not become the word of the decade, but it has Google power behind it. The San Francisco-based company announced it has closed a seed investment from Google Ventures, among many others. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.