More good stuff is coming out of the eBay Live conference including a screenshot of Paypal with Skype integration where skypers can send or request a payment via PayPal. The picture is fuzzy but not the logic of this marriage.

I remain a bit puzzled why this wasn’t a right away feature after the billion dollar deal closed? Lest we forget it’s been some nine months since the deal closed.

Also, how is eBay/PayPal going to stop this service being used for purposes that violate their TOS? PayPal has cracked back hard against the adult and gambling industry, see my comments back in February in Wallet envy: GBuy vs. Paypal. What’s to stop these people from setting up live customer support reps and gathering the money through Skype? The implementation of the feature was easy, but it makes me wonder if the delay was figuring out how to deal with policing the usage of the feature.

And then there’s GBuy
Meanwhile, Wednesday June 28 is the day we might finally see the long awaited Google’s payment system called GBuy. Google has not made a big deal out of this being some PayPal threat, but plenty of analysts and armchair tech quarterbacks are seeing it that way.

As a GOOG investor I look forward to them entering this market. Seems like a natural fit to integrate payments into Gmail, Gtalk and other properties just as eBay is doing with Skype although Google has made very few comments as to their intentions. I’m disappointed we didn’t see something by the end of 2005 as was misprojected in USA Today in June 2005.

Where do Microsoft and Yahoo end up in this without a payment services of their own? Kind of interesting how these companies all end up being each other’s customers in one way or another.

Bring on the Paypal/Skype and bring on the GBuy/Gmail/Gtalk. And whatever else Microsoft and Yahoo want to do to counter, that’s fine with me too. Competition breeds excellence.