I hesitated to report this at first. It was a little too ‘rumor-ish’ when I saw mention of it, but now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will, in fact, open up an online payment transaction site, of the same sort as PayPal, by the end of this year. I wish I could provide a link to the original article, but it’s all on ‘pay-per-view’ sites. I just happened to sneak through a loophole and take a (very) quick free look.

I’m sure it will face the same criticism leveled at most new Google features these days. There will be cries of Doom and privacy risks. Ignoring that all this while, no-one seems to have actually been ruined by anything Google has done. Still, they never do anything the way people would expect them to, so I admit to being anxious to see what they dream up. I think there’s still plenty of room for more than one payment service, just as there’s room for more than one auction site.

[tags]google,paypal,ebay,electronic payment[/tags]