The New York Times reports that Roy J. Bostock, chairman of Yahoo’s board, said Thompson’s appointment won’t change Yahoo’s plans to sell off to Asian partners its stakes in Yahoo Japan and Chinese company Alibaba Group, which are still in negotiations. But it is said to reduce the chances Yahoo would be sold to private equity investors. Bostock’s quoted in the Times as saying, “I do not envision us not being a public company going forward.”

According to the classified, the payment operations team will monitor and report on all money coming into Facebook:
“Projects driven by Payment Operations team members will potentially contribute millions of dollars to Facebook’s business, as well as enable the company to scale and expand its operations in the coming years.”

Estimates from Business Insider show Facebook’s gift store brought in $75 million last year. Users playing popular social games like Farmville purchase many of their virtual goods through intermediaries such as PayPal; Facebook stands to make serious gains by taking a larger portion of that businesses. Virtual goods in developer Crowdstar’s new game Happy Island can only be bought through Facebook.

However, a long-term goal appears to be setting up a system that would rival PayPal, allowing users to buy goods and services from third-party e-cmmerce sites. Facebook Connect allows users to register accounts on third-party sites.

To buoy the growing importance of payments, last summer Facebook brought on Prashant Fuloria, who helped run Google Checkout, and Ivan Kirigin, an engineer from payments startup TipJoy.

He was even mentioned in Owen Thomas’ goodbye missive to make sure Valleywag stays on top of the Silicon Valley gossip heap. Unsurprisingly, Thiel doesn’t really apprecate it. He tells peHub that he thinks the Nick Denton spawn is “destructive and that Valleywag is the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda.

Valleywag had recently noted, through leaked documents, that Thiel didn’t make as much from the sale of PayPal as he believes he deserved. Using info from the documents about a fund Thiel runs, Valleywag said he is merely a millionaire not a billionaire.

Thiel said he never complained, “I think we did something well, but we were also a little bit lucky, and the notion that people didn’t make enough money is just crazy. I honestly don’t know where they come up with this stuff.”

I think Gawker has gotten meaner in its old age, and Owen Thomas, specifically, can be a blowhard, albeit a witty one. But it got him a better and bigger paying job, so….

UPDATE: The new Valleywagger, Ryan Tate, responds with “Valleywag will continue to be a place that prints the truths that others are too polite to say out loud.” Right. Between the speculation, guesses and extrapolations, we will find the truth damn it.

Ignacio Fanlo, CEO of AdBrite stated “We are excited to have a technology executive of Daniel’s caliber join AdBrite. Daniel has a proven track record architecting and building highly scalable marketplace systems. His skills are a perfect match to help scale AdBrite’s business and enhance our targeting and matching capabilities.”

Prior to AdBrite, Issen spent almost 6 years at eBay, where he held many engineering management positions throughout the firm. Within eBay, Issen was responsible for all aspects of finding, including catalogs, attributes and search. He was the also sole architect for the site Kijiji.

Issen stated “AdBrite is a scale leader and innovator in the online ad marketplace. I am excited to join the team and look forward to expanding AdBrite’s robust ad targeting and optimization capabilities.”

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) will be offered to Yahoo Mail users to keep out unwanted mail. John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail told Reuters “It is a big step forward for consumers in defense against the bad guys.”

Paypal and eBay are the two most targeted companies for phishing emails according to Trend Micro. It is estimated that one out of every 173 emails sent worldwide contains phishing attacks.

DKIM detects encrypted digital signatures to verify the origin of the message. However for the DKIM technology to be effective, both the user sending and the user receiving the email need to have their mail services signed up to DKIM.

Security analyst with Forrester Research, Chenxi Wang said to Reuters “Two years ago if you asked companies whether they were using e-mail authentication, most people wouldn’t have cared. The industry is slowly coming around.”

- Customer experience is #1
- Hubris was the death of many a online operation during the tech boom
- On the web your competition is still just a click away

BACKGROUND:
In March of this year, I listed several pieces of DJ equipment on eBay and the highest bidder won with a bid of $865.99. He called right away and promptly paid using PayPal (a subsidiary of eBay). The buyer mentioned that he was headed home from work in Manhattan to New Jersey via the Port Authority bus terminal, so I agreed to meet him there and drop off the items. He promptly paid using PayPal and the whole deal was completed within 2 hours.

I thought that was the smoothest transaction ever!

WRONG

PROBLEM:
About a month later I got an e-mail from PayPal notifying me that the transaction was ‘reversed’.

Transaction reversed? What do you mean?!

Apparently the buyer used fraudulent funds to purchase my DJ equipment and apparently there was nothing PayPal could or was willing to do about it.

But I thought that PayPal had safeguards built in to prevent this type of fraud?

You thought wrong, tough luck.

But I thought PayPal’s sign-up process, what with the depositing small sums into your bank account, is designed to prevent someone signing up fraudulently.

You thought wrong, tough luck.

But I thought I was protected because the screen explicitly said ‘Eligible for Seller Protection’ in bright green letters?!

You thought wrong, tough luck.

As illustrated by the screenshot above, there was a clear cue on this page indicating that I am eligible for the ‘Seller Protection Policy’ (lower left corner). I clicked on the little question mark next to the word ‘Eligible’ just to make sure. A new page opened with tons of text in legalese (keep in mind that I knew to click on the tiny question mark, many people in the interactive media/tech industry don’t realize that the average person on the web is not very tech savvy and prefers words to symbols).

Like any reasonable human being, I am not fascinated by the technicalities of law PayPal’s lawyers carefully crafted for their Seller Protection Policy page. Like any reasonable human being, I did not take the time take to read through it. On the web, we are faced with user agreements and similar documents on an almost daily basis. We are all used to them and we just hope that the companies we are doing business with have our best interests at hand when we click that ‘I agree…’ checkbox.

Not in this case.

It turns out that buried within that legalese text, there was something about the little fact that in order to be eligible for the ‘Seller Protection Policy’, there has to be a receipt from a shipper. This means that any transaction where the item is not shipped is automatically disqualified.

Let me repeat that and let it sink in: any transaction where the item is not shipped is automatically disqualified from the ‘Seller Protection Policy’, even if there is a receipt and in the lower left corner of the transaction page it says ‘Eligible’ in green letters.

I was selling DJ equipment and it would’ve cost an exorbitant amount to ship it anywhere. I preferred that the customer was local and indicated so in my eBay listing. This was of little significance to PayPal (subsidiary of eBay). There was a hand written receipt. This did not matter to PayPal since their objective was to put the burden on me to find and take action against the perpetrator of the crime.

SOLUTION:
This brings us to the topic of customer experience on the web and why it is critical. The solution to this specific problem, like with most customer experience issues, is fairly simple. I see it on a daily basis, reviewing websites for a living through my company — qau (qa-u.com) (shameless plug).

PayPal can simply put all of the exceptions to the ‘Seller Protection Policy’ in red letters right below the word ‘Eligible’ on the transaction page.

That’s it. End of story.

I, along with countless others selling items locally without shipping, would’ve known that we don’t qualify for ‘Seller Protection’ and would’ve proceeded with more caution, perhaps choosing to pay the shipping fees for the added security.

At the very least, PayPal should change the tiny question mark symbol to a text link that reads something like ‘Exceptions to the Seller Protection Policy’ — again, in red letters.

CONCLUSION:
Since the incident, I’ve learned that there are many other people who feel PayPal doesn’t own up to it’s share of responsibility. There is a growing discontent with PayPal and this brings us back to the subject of hubris and the death of many a dot-com around the year 2000. PayPal is clearly the #1 company in terms of the sheer volume of financial transactions they process on the web. PayPal feels untouchable. However, PayPal is not a bank and does not follow Federal banking regulations, thus it follows its own rules which may or may not always be in the interest of the customer. It is a matter of time before people get wise and a better alternative comes along. Remember, on the web competition is just a click away. Customer experience is #1.

The service will solicit existing PayPal users to register their phone number and create a PIN number in order to ensure secure transactions. They will then be able to respond to marketing calls-to-action they find in the form of a number code in print, television, outdoor, or online advertisements. Soon after they respond, they will be asked to confirm the purchase and supply their PIN.

Bravo is using the service to sell kitchen products featured in its “Top Chef” cooking reality show. MTV has already begun offering the newest CD from the Pussycat Dolls through Click to Buy.

PayPal Mobile is also making it easy for mobile users to donate to charity. Currently, their customers can donate to Amnesty International, Starlight Starbright, and UNICEF with their mobile phone.