During a time of projected weakness for most retailers, including online sales, Amazon reported that 2008 was its "best ever" holiday shopping season. However, the online retailer provided few details in a Wall Street Journal report, declining to comment on its 2008 sales prices or margins, although Amazon did say that on peak day, Dec. 15, it received a more than 6.3 million orders at a pace of 72.9 items per second. The company's top sellers for the period of Nov. 15 through Dec. 19 were Nintendo's Wii, Jakks Pacific's Eyeclops night-vision goggles, Samsung's 52-inch LCD High-Definition television and Apple's …

Project Playlist has found itself in dire straits after MySpace and Facebook disabled the streaming music app from their sites. MySpace disabled the service five days ago while Facebook finally decided to follow suit yesterday. The official statement from Facebook PR reveals that the Recording Industry Association of America initially contacted the popular social network last summer requesting the removal of the Project Playlist application for copyright violation and then recently made the same request again. Facebook said it referred the RIAA's letters to Project Playlist so it could resolve the issue directly with the music organization. In the meantime, …

Bloomberg provides yet more proof that the recession has finally hit Silicon Valley. Once considered immune to the economic fallout, firms in the area are cutting back their spending and laying off workers by the thousands. "Lots of my friends have been laid off," said one project manager for Microsoft Corp. in Palo Alto, California. "I absolutely watch what I spend. I feel lucky I've survived, but you never really know." With a 7% unemployment rate, Silicon Valley now has 4,000 fewer jobs today than at this time last year, the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy …

The holidays have traditionally been a robust period for eBay, but not this year says The Wall Street Journal, citing the company's slide in visitor traffic and deteriorating sales. According to research from comScore, weekly traffic to eBay fell 16% between Nov. 3 and Dec. 14 from a year ago. By comparison, fixed-price competitor Amazon had 6% more unique visitors over the same time period, leading many analysts to question where the edge is online auctioneering. Indeed, Lorrie Norrington, the president of eBay Marketplaces, declined to comment on the company's holiday sales. "We are still three times the volume …

As the Yahoo board continues to take its sweet time naming a successor to former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, TheStreet.com invites Ironfire Capital Manager Eric Jackson to give his reasons behind the Web giant's four-year slump. First and foremost is lack of product leadership -- i.e., the company has had its fingers in too many pies. All those acquisitions Yahoo's made over the years were never sufficiently integrated, leaving "a string of disparate businesses" under its umbrella. A decided lack of communication between high-level execs and lower-level managers is another reason. As one former Yahoo admits to Jackson, "I …

CNet's Greg Sandoval claims that it was YouTube that actually began removing Warner Music Group's videos from its site after Warner came to Google with an "11th-hour demand" for better financial terms. Warner over the weekend said that it began asking that YouTube remove its videos after talks to renegotiate its licensing deal broke down, but two sources close to the situation claim that YouTube actually walked away from the deal first. According to the sources, managers at YouTube considered Warner's demand, only to begin pulling Warner music videos as its answer. YouTube also first notified the public of the …