This is literally yesterday’s news, but was worth a mention here.  From the eBay Ink blog:

Marc Andreessen has joined eBay’s board of directors, effective immediately.

Andreessen is most noted for co-founding Opsware and Netscape, and served as AOL’s CTO immediately following its acquisition of Netscape. His current venture is Ning, a new consumer Internet company founded in 2004 that is focused on building a next-gen platform for social networking. Rather than having its users join one all-encompassing social network, Ning encourages and allows users to create their own social networks for anything they’re passionate about. In four years, more than 480,000 social networks have been created by users on Ning.

I had a chance to meet Marc briefly as part of the OpenSocial launch @ Google last year.  There is no question in my mind that eBay will benefit from having his perspective on the board given their current challenges.

Some interesting facts & links:

• Marc has one of the best blogs out there, bar none.  If you don’t read it, you should.
• Marc has a fairly strong LinkedIn profile.
• Mac is the Co-Founder & Chairman of Ning, which is the wide-open, community platform for building social networks.

In particular, I’m going to flag a post I wrote over a year ago about how eBay missed its opportunity to buy Ning cheaply, and why that acquisition would have made sense.  I caught some flack for that last summer… feeling at least partially vindicated here.