{"id":363086,"date":"2010-02-25T16:26:43","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T21:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=101740"},"modified":"2010-02-25T16:26:43","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T21:26:43","slug":"paypal-wants-to-hitch-its-wagon-to-the-social-train","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/363086","title":{"rendered":"PayPal Wants to Hitch Its Wagon to the Social Train"},"content":{"rendered":"

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eBay CEO John Donahoe told a Goldman Sachs technology conference today that the company’s PayPal subsidiary wants to become the de facto payment engine for social media, the Wall Street Journal reports<\/a>. “We want to be the platform on which some of these social-media applications get built,” he told the attendees, referring to Twitpay<\/a> — a service that allows users to send payments via Twitter and was recently acquired<\/a> (after failing to gain much traction) — as an example. PayPal has been trying to open itself up to developers in order to allow them to build payment more easily into their services and software, to that end launching a developers conference to talk about its open platform several months ago<\/a>. And it has had some success attracting social networks, including Facebook, which said last week that it will use PayPal for transactions<\/a> for virtual goods on the site.<\/p>\n

Donahoe effectively pitched his service as the only game in town for large-scale social payments, saying:<\/p>\n

The risk and fraud capabilities you need, the anti-money laundering\u2026the ability to do it cross-border are very different things than just providing a virtual currency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Facebook confirmed when it announced the PayPal deal that it was the complications of multiple currencies and international transactions that led it to choose the eBay unit as a partner, since 70 percent of its users live outside the U.S. It’s worth noting, however, that PayPal has had its own difficulties with international payments, as a recent ban on transfers to India<\/a> illustrates. Donahoe also told the conference that he sees a growing demand for payments involving digital goods, and that PayPal has been talking<\/a> to companies including Zynga, the leading maker of Facebook-based social games.<\/p>\n

I see that trend, particularly in virtual goods, continuing. PayPal is well positioned to be the foundation for many of these digital goods.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Facebook arrangement makes PayPal the engine behind Facebook Credits, an in-network payment scheme that the social network is pushing game makers and others to use, which gives Facebook 30 percent<\/a> of the proceeds from each transaction. According to one analyst, such payments could become a $100 million business<\/a>.<\/p>\n