Lala, an online music service, certainly has had many advantages. The team is top-notch, with veterans from companies like Yahoo! (YHOO), eBay (EBAY) and Blogger. They also have had the benefit of learning from the many failed companies in the music space. Oh, and Lala was able to raise a substantial amount of money.

But, somehow this was not enough. If anything, Lala continued to languish and as a result, agreed to sell out to Apple (AAPL). The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

I wouldn't have thought swapping sites would be a threat to eBay, but when I read a story in Business 2.0 with the headline, "The eBay of Swap," I started to wonder.

The article profiles a fledgling company called Swaptree that will allow users to trade CDs, Books and movies. Best of all, it promises to engineer three or four-way trades, increasing the chances that you'll be able to swap your long-neglected CD of Billy Joel's The Stranger for someone else's used copy of Freakonomics (read my review here).

The Swaptree won't charge a fee, but plans (hopes?) to make money from advertising. All goods are judged to be the same value, so no money changes hands between users.

I think Swaptree sounds like a great idea and I will probably try it some day (it's not open to the general public yet). But it has a long way to go before it's a challenge to eBay. And the article notes that swap sites have had trouble gaining traction in the past.

And the truth is, eBay long ago stopped being about individuals pawning off their used stuff to each other. Now, eBay's business is driven by pros who want to make a good old-fashioned profit margins on what they sell. For all those reasons, I think eBay can feel pretty safe as the king of auction sites -- even if it's not yet the kind of e-commerce.

The Business 2.0 article referenced several other swap sites: Peerflix for movies, Bookins for books and La La for music. SwapThing lets people swap almost anything. Anyone tried one of these sites? Want to weigh in for the rest of us?