I’m a big fan of Erick Schonfeld’s writing. You may remember him as Futureboy from B2, but now he’s blogging in various places. Today Erick has a great interview with Meg+JD I recommend you check out.
The ‘new’ news for me was this tidbit:
Whitman: We wonder if there is a way to embed reputation into
Paypal. Is there a way to travel across the Web with your Paypal wallet
and some other aspect of reputation?
I’ve always thought it was extremely clever (and a benefit of coming after ebay/paypal) of Google Checkout to put the feedback in the payment system, because it makes it portable. As a merchant, I can now bring that feedback to all my sales and have it accumulated. If I’m an eBay seller, I have my ebay feedback and there’s no way to link it to shopping.com or even my ecommerce site. By moving that into PayPal you’d have a genius move that would REALLY lock merchants into paypal, because if you left you’d be losing your reputation. That would only make sense if you had a bad rep, and that’s aligned with Paypal/ebay’s goal too so it really ‘works’.
