Today at the Paypal X Innovate 2010 Conference Paypal, in a demo with the social shopping cart payments provider, Payvment, announced in a live demo their new “Embedded Payments” platform. The platform, at least according to the demo, allows developers, by just copying and pasting, to place a simple “Pay with Paypal” button into any app or website.
Paypal also demoed an integration with GigaOm, allowing premium content to the readers of the site, enabling GigaOm to charge for premium content. The demo implied the integration was very simple and easy to implement.
We are in a new era of APIs. We’ve gone beyond the era of backend, REST-based APIs that you have to write communications code to pull the data and then formulate the front-end to look the way you want. We’ve now moved into an era where implementing someone else’s platform is as simple as “copy” and “paste”, and nothing more.
Facebook has done something similar with their “Social Plugins” platform, launched earlier this year at their F8 conference, and that was preceded with Twitter‘s “@Anywhere” platform, each one allowing simple copy and paste into the view of any website or application. I’ve talked about the Building Block Web – Paypal has just entered the View component of the Building Block web. This is a very useful move by Paypal and I can’t wait to start playing with it!
