After looking through eBay’s somewhat hidden terms of use, (click on the “show” link beside “some examples”) he concludes:

This is eBay flexing their trust and safety muscles to control the way sellers take credit cards (and as a side-effect, limit their leverage with Google Adwords) if they feel it starts to infringe on the PayPal asset.

It’s ironic they would do this here, and in the same breath go to Congress and fight the Net Neutrality battle.

You can’t fight for an open internet one day and then implement policies that close the walled garden the next.

Overture buster

Google is uniquely positioned to leverage its search popularity and combine it with a payment gateway solution.

It seems that Checkout is not just a PayPay competitor but a value added feature for AdWords subscribers. You get free payment processing at a ten to one rate for money spend on AdWords. For every dollar, euro, peso, whatever you spend on AdWords you get ten times that amount in free credit card processing for goods purchased through Google Checkout. Spend $500 per month in AdWords advertising and your first $5000 in sales won’t cost you any processing fees. A rule of thumb is to spend 10% of income on advertising. Google is making it attractive to spend that 10% on AdSense

That is something that no AdWords competitor can currently offer. Google goes even farther by placing a little shopping cart on the AdWords links that feature Google Checkout users.

Fewer forms to fill out

Using a buy through Google Checkout might allow you to bypass filling out forms with each merchant, too. Click the Google Checkout button and you go directly to Google’s processing center.

Once you’ve entered your shipping and credit card information once, you shouldn’t have to do so again. In theory this means between merchants, too. Though I imagine that many merchants will choose to place the purchase via Google Checkout at the bottom of an information collection form anyway.

As a consumer, I like the idea of not having to give my personal data out to everybody. As a merchant, I absolutely want contact information for my customers. Previous customers are the best targeted market there is for further marketing efforts. And research shows that existing customers don’t seem to mind an advert that says, “If you bought X, you might like to consider getting Y to compliment it.”

As with most payment gateways, the merchant does not handle your credit card information. That stays with Google. And Google keeps a record of your transactions across merchants, which you can view, like an online bank statement.

What I don’t see is any statement by Google the it won’t use your purchasing information for for it’s own marketing purposes. Google already admits that it scans Gmail for targeted advertising.

Google’s checkout Policies are laid out. Most, like not selling pornography, unauthorized goods or body parts seem obvious. Some like a proscription against selling magazine subscriptions are less so. I guess it’s a guilt by association matter. Too many people in that industry have been too sleazy for too long.

Seller’s features

Like PayPal, Google Checkout offers online wizards that make creating individual buy buttons easy to create, then paste into your pages.

Google even makes it possible to sell your products without having a website. Using Google Base, you can sell directly from Google search pages. If you don’t have a website, Google will create a free web page for your products

But integration with store software may take a while. PayPal has a long history and using it as processing gateway with shopping cart software is easy. It will take a while before Google Checkout’s API’s filter down to shopping developers, so don’t expect to integrate Google Checkout into your existing store right away.

Google has quite a bit of experience with catching fraud and Checkout proactively identifies and filters out fraudulent transactions, and under our Chargeback Resolution policy, Google evaluates all chargebacks you receive and, whenever possible, fights them on your behalf.

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor’s blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you. GeoURL is listing 227,263 sites.

The process is straightforward. Use their wizard to generate meta tags for your latitude and longitude. Add those to the head of the pages you want indexed. In this case it is the header.php file in the site template. Ping their server and you are added to the database. You can use the service to find other sites listed in your location, too.

My recent forays have included efforts to find nutritional information, tax forms and how to build a cold frame (that’s a kind of mini-greenhouse). All the information was there but I ended at the FDA not by trying to navigate its site but via search engine.

There have been a couple of specialty search engines that focused on the government for a while. I’ve used GovSpot, and SearchGov in my information addiction. But now the 800 pound gorilla of search engines, Google as joined in government search. Like the others, but with a lot more muscle, it appears to be a kind of one stop shop for government information, including customizable front page news feeds. BTW it should be 86 and sunny in Washington D.C today. Google does state government documents in the site, too.

I imagine that this is just the first of this type of focused search sites and a good one to start with. “There is a trend toward developing more finite, category-specific searches,” said Deborah Fallows, senior research fellow at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “Government employees are among the heaviest users of government Web sites, so there’s a market.”

A November 2004 Pew survey found that 54 percent of Internet users have looked for information from government Web sites, and 10 percent of users will look for such information on any given day.

Mike Arrington has a Yahoo Photos review up at TechCrunch. At first glance, it looks like Yahoo has taken the best bits of Flickr and rolled them into Yahoo Photos. The community features like commenting and voting are all there, as are tagging, organization with sets, and easy uploading via a browser-based tool. The big news is unlimited uploads and bandwidth, all for free. Another new feature is the inclusion of “Smart Albums” that update automatically based on tags, popularity, or date. Users can keep a “Latest Photos” set that gets populated when new photos are uploaded. These dynamic sets can also allow friends’ photos.

Yahoo Photos also appears to be able to display more photos on a single gallery page, though I’ve noticed some recent changes on Flickr that show movement in this direction — Flickr photostreams display as two columns now instead of one, and sets have more display options available. The usability of Yahoo Photos looks to be an improvement over Flickr, which is not to say that Flickr is difficult to use. Rather, Flickr might be too “techy” for some users, and Yahoo Photos looks to make things as easy as possible. Grandma won’t have any difficulty ordering prints.

You need to get a Yahoo account to use the service but your existing login will work if you have signed up for any Yahoo service in the past.

Create a calendar using your photographs. Know what day it is at a glance! Plan ahead! Impress your friends with your pre-cognitive powers! All you need is a photo from that fancy digital camera of yours. Heck, go nuts and make a whole year. Works with your photos hosted on Flickr or anywhere else.

P.S. It’s free