Today, he says it’s all “new eBay.”

At the company’s analyst meeting at its headquarters, the company demonstrated the major changes made over the past couple of years and laid out plans for how local, mobile and social will lead the next wave of commerce.

In the afternoon, Bob Swan, eBay’s CFO, took the stage to give the financial rundown that everyone had been waiting for since the morning.

Swan highlighted PayPal’s growth trajectory by saying that it expects to double revenues over the next three years to between $6 billion and $7 billion, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010.

He also talked up how mobile was gaining speed by saying that PayPal mobile transactions were estimated to double to $2 billion in total payment volume, and that mobile on marketplaces will double to $4 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Meanwhile, when looking at the company’s gross merchandise volume, he sees the business increasing from $60 billion in 2010 to $75 billion in 2013. And, to support the strength of the business, the company anticipates generating $7.5 to $8 billion in free cash flow by 2013.

Swan wants to stress that these growth rates are being driven from the company’s core businesses, and not from the more innovative stuff eBay is working on in local, mobile and social. “We are in a  different state than we were in March 2009, where the crystal ball was murky and full of potholes. Now the crystal ball is full of opportunities. We have unmatched advantages that position us to win.”

That’s possible because of the improvements the company has been making over the past two years.

“We’ve made significant and necessary changes necessary for growth. Two years ago, search was optimized for auctions and suffered. Two years from now, search will be a competitive advantage for eBay,” said Mark Carges,” eBay’s CTO of marketplaces. “We’ve rolled out many tailored experiences and selling on eBay will be vastly simplified.”

To illustrate the change, Carges showed how there’s no more irreverent banner ads on the search results page, and instead of returning up to 19 paid results, it gives shoppers the “best matches” and cuts the time in half that it takes to return results.

The company also launched the buyer protection program, which will return the price of the item and the cost of shipping to customers unhappy with purchases.

Christopher Payne, VP of eBay marketplaces North America, said the company will start to increase marketing spend on these improvements to drive awareness: “We’ve been intentionally quiet as we fixed fundamentals, but starting in the second half, we’ll start marketing this new experience.”

At lunch, analysts were so eager to talk to Donahoe he wasn’t even able to get to his seat. They crowded around him in the lobby to grill him on what impact Facebook, Apple and Google were going to have on the company’s payments aspirations.

Donahoe wasn’t phased, saying that PayPal is technology agnostic. He will support BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone — and all of the iterations they produce from phones to tablets. What’s more, he says, the company is building the tools and technology for merchants to keep up in what can be a daunting world.

Analysts appear impressed with the improvements. Today, the company’s shares traded up nearly 8 percent, or $2.57, to $34.53, coming close to marking a 52-week high.

“Tablet was the focus, but the changes we did also free it up to be more flexible for other contexts as well,” Honeycomb lead designer Matias Duarte told Mobilized. “It’s about really eliminating all the barriers to all the different kinds of form factors that people might want to interact with.”

Google plans to show off its work with Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, at an event on Wednesday. There, it will talk about the specific changes it has made, as well as the vision behind the shift.

Duarte, who joined Google from Palm last year, said there were really three major areas of focus. Clearly one was to change the way Android worked so that it was suited to devices larger than a phone. But beyond that, Duarte said, Honeycomb was about evolving Android to be better overall at mobile computing tasks. Finally, Duarte said, Honeycomb is designed to make the operating system more usable.

“All of those are works in progress,” he said. “Our work is far from done in any of those.”

One of the most notable changes in Honeycomb is the fact that it no longer has a reliance on physical hardware buttons. That paves the way for all kinds of devices, Duarte said.

“Some of them might look more like a laptop…some of them might not even have soft buttons,” Duarte said. “They might be purely gesturally driven.”

The first Honeycomb devices, however, will all be tablets, starting with the Motorola Xoom, which is headed to Verizon in February.

But, if he has done his job right, Duarte said that hardware makers will be able to create devices that Google never even contemplated. “Whatever they come up with, the most important thing is that we have given that flexibility.”

That could range to attaching Android to a refrigerator or creating products aimed at a specific demographic, such as young kids or the elderly. Heck, someone could even use Android to build a big table computer to take on Microsoft’s Surface. “I can’t see why not,” Duarte said. “I can imagine that.”

As for the potential tablets in particular, Duarte notes that those who initially brushed aside Apple’s iPad when it debuted a year ago underestimated the impact of what Apple did in bringing the multi-touch screen to a larger-size device.

“I think those skeptics were short-sighted,” Duarte said. “That’s the genius of what Apple achieved with that iPad.”

The tablet experience, he said, is largely about the touch interface, which changes people’s relationship with the content they are viewing. In moving the content into a closer and more comfortable position, people relate more and have more emotional experiences, he said.

“People have seen screens that size and have been taking screens that size to bed with them and to their coffee shops with them. They’ve been sitting with them hunched over and in all kinds of contorted positions” Duarte said. “But having that touch interface means that you can interact with the Internet or with a book or with a video player in a totally different posture, in a totally different way. It changes how you engage with the content, how long you engage with the content and even how emotionally close you are to it.”

With Honeycomb, Duarte said, he wanted to make sure that Google was opening Android up to enable those kinds of experiences, but also improving the underpinnings of the operating system to be a more powerful computing experience.

One of the changes, he said, is recognizing that people use tablets differently than they use their phone, even if they are running many of the same types of programs.

“It used to be that Android was something that you held in your hand and you would use in these relatively fine slices of time throughout the day, and then when you sit down at a table or a desk or you go home, that Android stays in your pocket or goes in a charger,” he said. “Now your experience with Android is alternating between these fine slices and these longer periods….So we need to think of Android as an experience that you have 24/7, throughout the entire day. What that means is that you are doing a lot more and you are doing a lot more for longer periods of time.”

That shift, he said, means that the operating system needs to do a better job of shifting between tasks and notifying users of what things are going on in the background. With Honeycomb, Duarte said, Google is improving its recent application switching feature that lets users easily see the places they have been working and point to them, while at the same time getting better notifications from background activities without being constantly interrupted.

Duarte characterized Honeycomb as the biggest change since the debut of Android, but it is also the latest in a series of updates that have come in rapid succession. In many cases, both device makers and wireless carriers have struggled to keep pace with Google, often failing to allow their devices to stay updated with Google’s latest and greatest, even if the phones themselves were capable of being upgraded.

But while others wonder whether Google is moving too quickly in evolving Android, Duarte said he wonders why the rest of the industry is moving so slowly, and promises even faster change to come.

“Using computers suck, to this day,” Duarte said. “It’s one of my daily frustrations that the rate of change in computing experiences is so slow.”

In particular, Duarte said that the basic interaction with programs and files hasn’t changed much. “It’s the same way I did [things] in high school on a Mac Plus.”

One piece of that shift, Durate said, is evolving our expectations of computing devices from a world in which computer users put in information and turn a crank to get a result to one that more resembles an ongoing dialogue.

“What I am looking for is that sense that you get when jazz musicians improvise together,” he said. “The computer should be doing things in concert with you, in support [of] you, not acting like a servant waiting for commands and then returning with results. That’s a little aspirational, I know.”

Honeycomb will get the company partway to that vision, but Duarte said much of that work will reveal itself over time. But make no mistake, he said–although they don’t appear to be the stuff of science fiction, computers are starting to become extensions of the human brain.

“People always think of cybernetics with computers as being this thing that happens far in the future, and you have Star Trek, Borg-like scary things” Duarte said. “But the way computers are used today through social networking, through email, through accessing information like Google–they are already becoming [those] cybernetic parts of our mind.”

The promise comes in a blog entry posted by Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise. “Unlike most providers, we don’t plan for our users to be down, even when we’re upgrading our services or maintaining our systems,” writes Glotzbach. From now on, all downtime that does occur will be counted and applied toward the customer’s service level agreement. In fact, the entire section of its SLA that covers scheduled downtime is being removed. This includes periods of 10 minutes or less, which under the terms of its old agreement didn’t count as downtime.

Google also released some data about the availability of Gmail, both the consumer and enterprise versions. It says that in 2010 it managed to maintain uptime 99.984 percent of the time. This, Glotzbach says, works out to about seven minutes of downtime per month. Citing data from the Radicati Group, he says that makes Gmail 32 times more reliable than the average on-premise email system and 46 times more reliable than Microsoft Exchange.

Over the years, Google Apps has taken some criticism for downtime issues and for not meeting the level of availability spelled out in its agreement. Shortly after it introduced its premier version in 2007, there were reports of availability problems. And there have been occasional Gmail outages like this one in 2009. As services we use daily migrate to the cloud, downtime seems an unavoidable by-product, as this list of incidents in 2010 from Data Center Knowledge suggests. It may seem like a small thing, but Google is making a strong statement here. It will be interesting to see if any of the other cloud providers respond in kind.

But if you’re part of the large group of people who think that nothing is really private on the Web and that everyone should see everything you do online, then you’re really going to like Facebook’s new privacy policy. It’s designed to get Facebook users to share as much as they can with as many people as they can–including people who aren’t on Facebook.

Facebook tries to explain the policy changes in a lengthy blog post here, and you can find a slideshow that accompanied a press conference the company just held here.

But that will make your eyes glaze over. Here’s the short version:

• Facebook is simplifying the privacy setting controls it offers users. So if you want your pals to see your keg stand from Saturday night, but don’t want your parents to be privy, you should be able to do that more effectively. The company is experimenting with different ways to present the controls.
• Facebook also wants to encourage people to use the “everyone” setting, which right now just means “every Facebook user.” But the company is going to eventually change that setting to mean “everyone on the Web”–meaning that Google (GOOG) users, marketers, whoever, will be able to find that stuff, too.
• Facebook wants to expand the amount of data its users share with the world because the company thinks that the more exposure data get, the more valuable the data become. But it is doing its best to tamp down complaints from users who accidentally end up exposing kid photos or bachelor party snapshots or whatever. Hence the new, improved privacy controls, which are being rolled out before “everyone” really means “everyone.”

I know, I know. That short version wasn’t that short. But you’re going to hear plenty more about this in the coming weeks. Consider this a first chapter.