I just got out of a meeting with Paypal where we were talking about their new platform (which will make it cheaper and easier for startups to build payments systems and take money. High on the list of new features is split payments which allows developers who sell third party products to make a single charge to a consumer and take their cut before passing the rest of the payment on.
By the end of the meeting I was reflecting on the number of powerful platforms now at our disposal. In addition to Paypal over the last week I have been talking with startups working on top of Salesforce’s Force.com, Facebooks app Platform, Facebook Connect, Reuter’s OpenCalais, and Google’s App Engine, and there are many more platforms beyond that.
None of these platforms are new news on their own, but taken together I think they are game changing, or at least have the potential to be so. It is early days, but once these services are all working effectively (or their successors are) many if not most web startups will be able to focus the lions share of their
