With Chrome extensions, developers from outside Google can write software to modify the Chrome experience. Individuals can install these extensions to enable features that are useful to them, but aren’t necessarily of value to everyone who uses Chrome. (Those features are part of what Google will provide.)

A team at eBay has been working on an eBay Chrome extension (what else?), and apparently the Chrome team liked it so much they asked us to come and show-off the eBay extension at their launch event!

Unfortunately, the team lives in London, so they couldn’t fly all the way to California to be there. However, they passed the ball to me, and I agreed to be their talking head for a day.

Overall, my five minutes of Chrome fame went quite well. I talked about why Chrome extensions matter to eBay and also how third party developers can build their own eBay extensions, too. Also, as someone said to me: “they laughed at your jokes.”

But don’t take my word. My wife Beth joined me for the afternoon and took this beautiful flip HD video of my talk. (Warning: the sound is a little low.)

eBay Chrome Extension Demo from Tifton Drive Productions on Vimeo.

Now, as to the Sergey teaser in my headline…

While we were in the event space getting ready for everyone to come in, I looked up and saw a robot heading out of the corner of my eye. It looked like a small screen mounted on a skinny pole that itself was mounted on a wider base of wheels. (Think of a less human looking version of Number 5 from Short Circuit.)

All of a sudden the robot wheeled our way and we could see that there was a TV screen on the top (along with a WiFi router on the back side). Looking at us through the screen were two people. One of whom was Sergey Brin.

Before we could properly process any of those facts — as my post cannot recreate the surrealism of the experience — Sergey started talking and asking us questions. We realized the was a video camera mounted on top of the TV screen, so we were involved in a two-way video chat with Sergey, who was in his office, driving the robot around, and looking for people to talk with.

After some short chitchat, we almost got him to stay for the event, but it was still 30 minutes before kick-off, so he rode off in search of other projects.

After he left, someone else from Google came up to us and said “What did you think?” My reply: It was very on brand — exactly what I expected to find when I came here. :)

I don’t normally comment on these discussions, but there’s a pretty good one right now that I’m enjoying on the screen shot posted under the title a “new split screen GUI” view of eBay.

According to a comment, one person thinks this is some super-secret screen capture ferreted out by someone under NDA. Scot Wingo thinks this is a “snagged screen shot” of a special test “roaming around the playground.”

As usual, the reality is far more mundane. Since the evidence is posted publicly on eBay.com, I’m happy to debunk this.

Go to the eBay investor Web site and check out the “Boston Lunch Presentation” from February 1. (This deck is identical to New York lunch presentation from the day before.) Go to slide 14 “New approach to Fixed Price and Auctions: Early prototype.”

Look familiar?

In September, I was in Kansas City and Seattle; so far in October, I’ve been to Austin and Washington, DC, with a conference in San Francisco, thrown in for good measure in between.

On Monday, I leave DC for three days in Las Vegas, come back to speak at a show in San Jose, where we will be exhibiting, and then leave for a weekend in Orlando nine days later.

For reasons of sanity, I will not be going anywhere for Thanksgiving.

• DC PHP
• ApacheCon
• Zend/PHP Conference

I think I submitted a slightly different abstract for each conference, but the main core of all the presentations is the same: a case study of Dude, Where’s My Used Car, my eBay Motors / Google Maps mashup.

In particular, I show how I’m using the PHP 5 SOAP extension alongside magical methods and other PHP 5 goodness to provide a simple interface into eBay Web services. If you’ve never played with either ext/soap, the new OOP features, or SPL, then my goal is to introduce you to all the cool things they enable — things you cannot do in PHP 4.

If I get a chance to rewrite the front end AJAX code using a nice library, such as Dojo or YUI, I’ll show how I bind the data between the client and the server. Right now, the that particular code is handrolled, and totally sucks, so I won’t be showing that off. :)

If you’re going to ApacheCon, I am looking to roadtrip to Lockhart, TX for a little bit of BBQ. Let me know if you’re interesting in coming along, of if you can suggest someplace else to go instead.

All three conferences have posted their schedules and all three look great! With one of the east coast, one in the middle of the US, and one on the west coast, there’s bound to be a show close to you. Sign up, come on by, and say hello!

As usual, I had a great time at the show. It was fun to see all my old friends and make new ones.

• Tracks on eBay, PayPal, Skype, Shopping.com, and ProStores Web services and APIs
• Sessions on, for lack of a better phrase, “Web 2.0″ content, including AJAX, widgets, XUL, mashups, and Chris Anderson presenting on “the long tail.”
• Keynote talks by Pierre Omidyar & Scott Cook, the head of eBay corporate strategy, and the head of eBay corporate architecture.
• Business talks and panels by Digg founder Kevin Rose, SocialText founder Ross Mayfield, SixApart’s Anil Dash, SoftTech Venture Consulting’s Jeff Clavier, and others.
• A half day unconference, where you can get together to share your knowledge on the topics that matter to you. (Check out our Conference Wiki to start participating before the show begins.)
• An opening kick off party at the House of Blues, a beer bash the next night, and general Vegas fun and glamour. (Did I mention the show is in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino?)

Best of all, the whole show is only $395. It’s not free, but compared to the thousands of dollars similar shows cost, this is a serious bargain. We don’t want price to be a reason why you can’t participate.

The opening party is the night of June 9, the conference is the 10th and 11th, and the unconference is the morning of the 12th.

Full details are available on the Developer Conference web site.

That means the Skype userbase has almost doubled since eBay bought it last fall. Wow.