eBay's announcement meshed with one of the key themes outlined during the opening day of the conference: That major Web players such as eBay, Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. increasingly are becoming platforms themselves as they provide connections into their services and databases.

"The Internet is the platform," said Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly & Associates founder and president during his opening keynote. He termed these major Web sites and portals the "big, killer apps of the Internet."

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"These things are services and not packaged apps," he said. "They're exploring how to become platform players themselves by exposing APIs to developers."

Following that path, eBay in the second quarter of this year plans to add support in its Web services offering for Simple Object Access Protocol and Java. It already had exposed its online marketplace to developers through an Extensible Markup Language-based Application Program Interface as well as a Microsoft Windows software development kit for .Net integration.

"This lets developers use more of the tools they want," said Debbie Brackeen, director of the eBay Developers Program.

Mainly in the past four months, the eBay Developers Program has grown from about 200 developers to 4,000 developers, who have created links into eBay for everything from automating listings of auctions to handling post-transaction fulfillment.

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