There’s a new venue where eBay Sellers can show off their wares, and Buyers can browse items, all free of charge.

It comes courtesy of Twitter and suffers a name confusion – it’s that new.  The site’s logo refers to it at “Tweeb Bay” but the URL calls it www.tweebay.com – the URL falling foul of eBay’s copyright and trademark if previous legal actions out of San Jose are anything to go by.  Remember the legal debacle regarding PerfumeBay.com?

The site describes itself as -

Tweeb bay is a Free way to buy and sell your stuff using the power of Twitter. Tweeb bay will NEVER ask you for your Twitter Password. In order to do something on Tweeb bay, you MUST be following the Tweebay Twitter User. Every time you do some thing on Tweeb bay, we will send you a Direct Message on Twitter to confirm its you. Happy Tweeb baying.

How it Works – Tweeb bay allows you to buy and sell stuff easily and takes away the complexity of the process. Selling is easy, you have 240 characters to describe your item and can upload one photo so you need to make it count. So thats it, Have fun…

This is pretty much guaranteed to be getting a visit from the eBay legal Bloodhounds with the new announcement of -

You Asked, We Delivered – Tweeb bay proudly now supports Payments. We thought long and hard about which payment provider to use and finally settled on Google Checkout, the best payment gateway on the planet in our mind. If you don’t have a Google Checkout Account, don’t worry, they are Free and you can Sign up by clicking here or learn more about all the benefits by Clicking here.

OOPS! Google Checkout is not permitted anywhere on eBay.  However, that’s not the whole story.  Tweeb Bay seems to be setting itself up as a classified adverts service with the added function of being able to pull items from current eBay listings – double oops!  That is sure to lead to accusations of sellers selling off eBay and doubly cutting out eBay’s fees by accepting Google Checkout.

In many ways this is a massive nose-thumbing at eBay.  It’s almost as if this service is deliberately attacking eBay’s four most hallowed grounds simultaneously – the core sales platform, the payments service, the rapidly expanding classifieds services, and the instant P2P communications service.  Next Tweeb Bay only need to add a category for tickets and it’ll be a full house assault.

I love it.  I can’t help wondering if there’s an undeclared big-money player behind Tweeb Bay that’s out to give San Jose a bloody nose.  On the other hand it could be a less-cash-rich, disaffected Dolphin with tech skills, or maybe even someone hoping for a quick dip into the US $4bn war chest that eBay have accumulated for Mergers and Acquisitions.

I still haven’t signed up for Twitter, let alone this new service – bit pointless when I’m still using an older GSM mobile phone without web connection capability – but I guess I’ll have to drag myself up to date sometime soon.

Ed