Bloggers anticipating the Gbuy threat

The absence of any official statements from Google on its rumored new Internet payment system--dubbed Gbuy--hasn't kept bloggers from moving full force into analyzing the impacts such a service would have on the online marketplace.

Google is expected to unveil "GBuy," or the like, this week, possibly as soon as Wednesday.

The service would compete directly with PayPal, because it would enable surfers to use micropayments to buy everything from retail goods to individual bits of Web content. But it could also be a major threat to online retailers and even financial institutions, as it could allow people to fund a "Google wallet" directly from their bank account, sidestepping credit card charges.

Blog community response:

"Why does Google want to automate the advertiser click cycle and make it as fast as it possibly can? The first reason is obvious: Google makes money on click conversions. The more clicks done quickly, the more money for Google, and the happier the advertiser...I'm still cautiously optimistic about GBuy. If merchants can be incentivized by the potential to reduce click fraud, and if they're not leery of giving too much control to Google, perhaps they'll switch."
--eWeek's Google Watch

"What turns this into a potential killer app for Google is its apparent link to its newly announced Content Referral Network, an eBay style sales lead generation and transactional commission-based affiliate network that is bound to poach eBay (and Amazon and other online merchants') customers. Of course, the nice people at eBay must have seen this coming because they just announced the test launch of AdContext, an automated, keyword-based contextual ad system for use by its affiliate network which looks suspiciously like it was designed to claim a chunk of Google's territory."
--Enterprise Web 2.0

"So if a user found a book via Google Search, then the user could potentially directly purchase the book from the Publisher via GBuy instead of going to Amazon. No wonder Amazon sensed a threat and dumped Google search for Microsoft's search on its Web site."
--The Biz of Coding

"Don't you think they've begun to seriously overextend themselves, as well as take on a sort of Microsoft-borg-ish nature, assimilating anything and everything it encounters?"
--tpjunkie on Slashdot