PayPal President Scott Thompson announced at Web 2.0 this week that his company will be opening up its platform to developers, which should be good news, especially to startups.Below is the video of Thompson's announcement.

Thompson said that it will provide APIs into the PayPal system in two weeks (starting November 3). He indicated that he looks forward to developers creating send money applications for social networking sites all the way up to payroll systems in foreign countries. His remarks indicated that he believes this could start to transform what he called a $30 Trillion global payments market.

Over next year, he said, PayPal will release dozens of APIs.

Given PayPal's popularity in this market, the announcement could put an interesting damper on something like Facebook's foray into the payments business.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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