The rumours swirling about Skype being bought by eBay are interesting. The WSJ, Reuters and The Reg, not to mention bloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Fred Wilson, report it and report that people seem mystified about why eBay would want to diversify into skype.
It seems to me that this is true for eBay the online auction house (though some sort of Skype IM link to an eBay auction is intriguing) but far less true for Paypal. Even ignoring the likely saving in paying of credit card costs if Paypal is used to top up Skype accounts, Skype IDs may help to make paypal wallets a bit more ubiquitous because you would be able to send money to/from skype IDs instead or email addresses. Furthermore Skype does a lot of micropayment sorts of things just the way Paypal does.
I don't say the whole thing is completely sensible but as skype gets ported to cell-phones and PDAs it becomes entirely possible to imagine Skype users (IM ing and/orWifi sending) a SkypeID + Payment amount + Hash key to each other to pay for things - note that Skype ZONES is already working with regards to some of the WiFi/payment bits. This becoems even more interesting when you realize that Skype IMs are encrypted and that the Skype API is very open because now Skype can be used to send payment IMs to (say) ticket machines in the local WiFi zone... Skype plus Paypal could just be the Electronic wallet many of us have been waiting for for years and which we thought would be the killer app for 2.5G and 3G phones. Maybe it will indeed be so, but if so it will not be because of J2ME or any of the Y2000 era hyped M-comerce companies that we thought would do it.