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For years, PayPal had no rival in the online payments industry. Then, in 2007, Amazon launched its Amazon Payments, which not only gave PayPal a rival with real muscle, but was considered friendlier and more open to third party developers, thus why many apps utilized Amazon Payments instead of PayPal. And let’s not forget about Google Checkout, which also competes in the space.

However, Paypal is taking a swing back at the competition today, revealing PayPal X and Adaptive Payments, a new initiative that allow third party developers to utilize PayPal in completely new ways. Prepare yourself for split payments, payment aggregation, and PayPal on other websites.

The Basics of Paypal X

PayPal is essentially opening up its platform to developers so that they can build new products off of PayPal. This is called PayPal X. The first part of this new initiative is PayPal Adaptive Payments, which refers to the new APIs (application programming interfaces) that will help developers do new things with PayPal.

All of the developer-related information will be placed on PayPal’s one-character domain, X.com. Here are some of the things that are now possible:

- Send Money: Peer-to-peer payments can and will happen on multiple platforms, not just on PayPal.com

- Split Payments: You can now split payments among many recipients via the Platform. For example, if you need to pay multiple people a commission on the sale, you can send just one payment instead of four or five.

- Payment Preapproval: Once you log into a system and confirm prepayments, the API will automatically transfer funds based on pre-set specifications.

- Payment Aggregation: To reduce the costs of payment transactions, users can soon aggregate multiple payments into one lump transaction. Amazon Payments already offers this.

This could be good news for a lot of smaller firms and third-party developers. Let’s take TwitPay as an example. TwitPay allows users to send and receive micropayments via Twitter (). It is run on PayPal, and in fact is one of the first apps utilizing the Adaptive Payment platform (and probably the reason they switched from Amazon Payments). The new API lets you do things like send payments right on Twitpay.me (and hopefully soon split payments).

PayPal Adaptive Payments doesn’t come out to all developers and users until November, but expect to see more websites utilizing the new PayPal X very, very soon.

Earlier this year, Google made major noise by releasing Latitude, a location-aware service that lets you see where your friends are on a map, on your phone. However, although it worked on a variety of handsets, including BlackBerry, there was one huge omission that has perhaps limited adoption and hype for the service: iPhone.

Today, that changes. Google has announced that there’s now a version of Latitude for iPhone and iPod Touch, although, it’s not a downloadable application like it is on other mobile platforms. Rather, iPhone users can simply navigate to google.com/latitude in Safari () to sign in, see where there friends are, and automatically update their location and status.

Why no downloadable app in iTunes? Google explains on their blog:

“We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google () to serve maps tiles.”

Google also notes that unlike the other mobile platforms that Latitude currently works on – Android (), Blackberry, Symbian and Window Mobile – your location will only be updated each time you use the app, since iPhone can’t run applications in the background. This could make the app a lot less interesting – on BlackBerry, the locations of the few friends I currently have on Latitude are changing all the time as it updates with their movements as opposed to when they directly access the app.

Nonetheless, bringing Latitude to 40 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices is nothing to scoff at, despite the current limitations. Latitude is one of Google’s more important and ambitious social products, and now, it has a more legitimate opportunity to succeed, though we’ll have to wait and see how users respond to a mobile browser-based version as opposed to a native app.