eBay began rolling out announcements this past week, saying it would make photo-hosting free in the collectibles category. It's seemingly good news for sellers, though it could negatively impact third-party developers who use image-hosting to attract sellers to their services. According to a post by Dinesh Lathi on the eBay Ink blog, the company will limit the times it will make major changes to the site to twice a year - in the spring and in the fall. Read the details here. More announcements will be coming over the next few weeks, according to Jim Griffith.

eBay also rolled out changes to its discussion boards and quietly hosted a meeting of some top sellers in Long Beach, California last week.

I had the opportunity to talk to Blackthorne creator John Slocum recently in a podcast interview where he talked about how eBay has changed since he launched his listing tool in 2007, and about his new plans for a multi-channel listing tool. You can listen to the podcast here or on iTunes (subscribe to "Ecommerce Industry SoundBytes").

Classifieds aggregator Oodle recently raised an additional $5.6 million in funding. I'm hearing of more sellers who are listing items on classifieds sites, Craigslist in particular. One seller with whom I was corresponding said she lists on Craigslist locally, but, depending on the item, she also lists in other regions of the country. She said she advertises cash only and also accepts PayPal. "With Craigslist, you can't EVER say you accept money orders or all the weirdos and scammers come out and want to send you fake MO's and have you return $$ to them, etc." She was referring to the fake-check scam

We are still tabulating the results of our survey on Ecommerce and Social Networking, in the meantime, here are some interesting tidbits. Facebook is the most popular social networking site of the seven sites listed, with 52% of respondents using it. However, Twitter was slightly ahead of Facebook as the site most cited as helping online sales. The top reasons for using social networking sites were to gain visibility, promote products, and keep in touch with family and friends. Twenty-three percent of those using social networking sites use them more than once a day. We'll publish the full results in this week's AuctionBytes Newsflash newsletter.

Thanks for reading.