Speculation about Google’s impending answer eBay’s PayPal is running as high as the cash the search engine may be piling into its Google Wallet. Some astute observers are noting official filings, SEC regulations, and striking similarities to pre-Google Talk activities. But all in all, nobody knows anything.
“Because the Securities and Exchange Commission imposes a silent period on executives when they issue these stock offerings, Google gets to be coy about what it really plans to do,” writes James Coates of LATimes.com last week, convincingly speculating on what Google plans to do with the proceeds from selling $4 billion worth of stock.
The Googleplex was vague about those plans saying only the company would use the money for “acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies, and other assets.”
And then, someone points out that, as far back as April, Google filed to set up Google Payment Corporation.
But the rumor with the most hype comes, appropriately, from Google Rumors, a blog that reported a tip that http://www.google.com/wallet produced the same 404 redirect that appeared shortly before the launch of Google Talk.
But rumors are rumors, and the post has recently updated thanks to a careful reader who pointed out that a 404 redirect resulting from a non-existent entity will occur with an infinite number of combinations.
“If you type www.google.com/whatever you will get that 404 message. What happened with google talk is that when the user tried to get to talk.google.com it would be redirected to www.google.com/talk and thus showing the 404 message,” the commenter pointed out.
But the corporation filing is telling enough. Google Wallet is probably an inevitability, but the whens and wheres are only known inside the walls of the Googleplex.
