Skype the new Paypal?

August 2, 2005

A new Paypal payment method using Skype has been proposed by Marcus Williamson from Connectotel over on the Skype forums. Marcus proposes a means by which one Skype user could send Skype credits to another Skype user, similar to the Paypal model. Although of course with Paypal it's real money not "credits". Though the way Skype is going, it won't be long before we'll be exchanging in Skype currency or perhaps even Google currency.

On the thread he writes, "We are aware that a lot of companies are not able to generate revenue from Skype because of the absence of a payment API. This issue has been raised by a number of people over the last couple of weeks in blogs and forums. No developer alone can resolve this issue because it involves Skype making backend modifications to the Skype service." He has a good point. Leveraging Skype and allowing affiliates and developers to make money would be a smart move for Skype.

He then goes onto propose a new API for Skype payment.

For instance, one API call he suggests is:

PAY [vendor-skypename] [payment-amount] [subject-text]


He goes into security precautions to prevent fraud, etc. For a more detailed description check out this PDF file.

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