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Quote:Max Levchin, who immigrated to the United States as a teenager from Ukraine, achieved a smashing success in 2002 when he was just 26 years old.

The company he co-founded, PayPal, was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion...

He has a small firm in San Francisco, Slide, that he believes could be bigger than PayPal, even though its business model has changed at least three times in the past three months. In an interview in early November, Levchin talked about Slide as a photo-sharing site; later that month, it was more about group communications, a la Friendster; and last week, Levchin said he is looking to change the experience of Internet browsing...

Quote: Slide Inc. on Tuesday launched a free Web and desktop application that lets eBay Inc. sellers advertise their wares, and buyers keep track of favorite listings.

The tool lets eBay sellers take pictures of products and create a custom slide show of photos, news and other digital content to feature on eBay, blogs, wikis, Web sites, MySpace pages and more. Slideshow creators can incorporate photos from their collection, as well as feeds from other sites.

In limited trials since January, the service emerged with PayPal cofounder Max Levchin at the wheel...

Quote:Levchin's latest startup, Slide, has emerged as the No. 1 widget maker so far, largely because its programming tools have made it easy for people to add more pizazz to the pictures and videos decorating trendy hangouts like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo...

Hoping to cash in, the 32-year-old Levchin is pushing Slide down a potentially slippery slope by injecting advertising into the mix.

"On the surface, it seems like a risky idea because what if [users] don't want advertising in their widgets?" Levchin said. He concluded his idea would only work by making all the ads "user-initiated" -- that is, the marketing messages only appear if users voluntarily choose to blend a marketing campaign into their own personal widgets...