EBay has appointed Josh Silverman as the new chief executive of Skype, replacing Michael van Swaaij who was appointed interim boss in October 2007.

Van Swaaij stepped in temporarily after a series of embarrassing outages to the VoIP service in August 2007.

Silverman currently heads up another eBay company, ecommerce comparison site Shopping.com, and brings more than nine years of experience in running global consumer internet companies.

Silverman will join Skype on 24 March and report directly to John Donahoe, president and chief executive of eBay.

Donahoe is in the process of taking over from Meg Whitman, who will officially relinquish her post in April.

With more than 276 million registered users around the world Skype has grown hugely since it was founded in 2003 and was acquired by eBay in September 2005.

Prior to joining Shopping.com, Silverman held a variety of management roles at eBay, including helping to build a classifieds businesses in Europe.

Before joining eBay in 2003, Silverman was co-founder and chief executive of social event planning website Evite.

Succeeding Silverman as boss of shopping.com is Andre Haddad another eBay veteran who joined the company in 2001 when it acquired iBazar, a European online marketplace he co-founded and successfully ran in Paris.

Haddad will also be leading eBay's consumer electronics business.