As reported all over the web, this morning Google introduced their latest offering, google checkout.
AJ points out the depth of information Google now have applications for, and Marshall over at TechChrunch says:
I don’t know why I’d use Google Checkout over PayPal if I had a choice, and if I don’t have a choice I’m liable to resent it.
While they both make good points, personally I hope this becomes a wild success.
I’ve beaten to death what PayPal did to me, and it’s lead to quite a few purchases that I just couldn’t make. Paypal is the only low-cost payment scheme available a to lot of small companies and so plenty of them use it. With free transactions for AdWords users and costs after that quite a bit lower
than PayPal, I can see this becoming a popular choice, which means I’ll be able to buy from them 
The one element I am ignoring in all this is the privacy concerns, because I’ve ignored all of Google’s other offerings except gmail which I only use for a couple of mailing lists. If we have indeed just had Google’s full-blown version of passport served to us in bite-sized chunks, I welcome our new corporate overlords because I don’t subscribe to every single service they can track me with.
… well I will, as soon as they let people outside America sign up 
June 30, 2006 at 4:25 pm
You can sign up, just only as a consumer, not a shop. I’ve been bugged for years that Paypal won’t let me sign up from South Africa.
June 30, 2006 at 5:33 pm
When I try to sign up it won’t let me change the country, it’s forced to United States