The next feature for Loom is very simple but highly useful: the ability to attach a URL to a contact.

Why is this useful? Consider if you will, a world in which Amazon.com has decided to accept payments in Loom. Now here I am, an Amazon customer with a Loom wallet. So here's what I do. I create a contact called "Amazon.com". I attach the URL [link to amazon.com (secure)] to that contact.

Now when I want to go shopping at Amazon, I log into my Loom wallet and click the URL next to my Amazon contact. That takes me into the Amazon site in a new browser window or tab, and it carries my Amazon contact ID along with it.

Now Amazon can use that contact ID as my customer key in their database, and save my order history, reading preferences, and shipping address. Upon checkout, they can debit the funds off of my contact ID as well. All I have to do as a customer is fund that contact with enough money, either before I start shopping or right at checkout time when Amazon tells me the total.

Note that with Loom, a merchant site such as Amazon *never* needs to go redirecting to the Loom site and asking the user to log in there. Amazon just treats the contact ID like a pre-paid debit card.

This should make the merchant payment process extremely easy, and make things very easy for users as well. For one thing, the user doesn't have to type (or copy and paste) the contact ID into the merchant's payment form. That should make it even easier than using a traditional credit or debit card -- but with NONE of the risk of identity theft or unlimited loss.

-- Patrick Chkoreff