Recently, I discovered the newly launched PayPal Labs site (currently located at http://www.x.com). PayPal Labs is the new destination for the latest, greatest and hottest PayPal applications put out there by PayPal’s distributed payments team. It is meant to inspire engineers, product managers, and other employees at PayPal and to tap the creativity, innovation, and passion of their teams.

I also wanted to mention the new official PayPal Company/PayPal Labs blog, simply named, The PayPal Blog. The team of bloggers uses The PayPal Blog as a forum for their employees to engage other PayPal users, in order to connect them with company leaders and team members. In addition, the bloggers hope that users will share their feedback and discuss or comment on the latest happens at PayPal.

PayPal Labs is PayPal’s showcase site which allows you to take our experimental products for a spin. Many of these projects come from startup-like groups within PayPal, which is why the tubular design in this site pays tribute to the logo used in PayPal’s original Palm application.

Here’s a quick reference for applications currently available at PayPal Labs, so far…

• Facebook Request Money Application – Allows Facebook members to recoup lunchtime loans by requesting money from friends.
• Facebook Fundraising Application – Allows Facebook members to raise funds for just about any cause they’re passionate about.
• MySpace Fundraising Badge – Allows charitable organizations and political candidates to raise money through their MySpace page.
• Merchant Integration Wizard – Gives merchants a step-by-step guide for integrating PayPal’s payment services.

Facebook Request Money Application:

No longer will you have to pay Bruiser to run around and collect your old pizza debts for you. Use PayPal’s request money application to solicit repayment on Facebook through PayPal.

• Get the Facebook Request Money Application

Facebook Fundraising Application:

Whether your cause to is a camping trip with friends, or a triathalon for charity, the PayPal Fundraising Application for Facebook will help you reach out to your “friend-raising” network.

• Get the Facebook Fundraising Application

MySpace Fundraising Badge:

Look for PayPal fundraising badges on MySpace featuring charities like Kiva and The ONE Campaign, as well as political campaigns.

• Get the MySpace Fundraising Badge

Merchant Integration Wizard:

Integration Wizard includes Checkout Flow Overview: Typical Shopping Cart Checkout Flow, Express Checkout Shopping Cart Flow, Express Checkout Payment Option Page Flow. Integration Process: Integration Parameters, Integration on the Shopping Cart Page, Integration on the Billing Page, Integration on the Order Review Page, Integration on the Order Review page for Order Confirmation.

• Use the PayPal Merchant integration Wizard

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

I am excited to see so many of the larger companies launching these “Labs.” It is a great way to discover and test new features and applications like the ones mentioned in this article. It also helps to spark the creative side of a company’s development team or engineers and may even help talented new developers that hope to land a popular application for one of these large companies. I somewhat expected to see a PayPal Labs launch sometime, but thought it might tie in with the already available eBay Labs. Glad they separated the two though.

By the looks of things so far, the PayPal Labs site is already rocking, with the addition of 4 very popular and useful applications. Not only do they cater to PayPal users, but they also merge the world of social networks like MySpace and Facebook in with the payment processor for a match made in heaven. Think about it, payments on profile pages is the next logical step, now you can do it with PayPal.

Be looking for similar applications from Google in the next 6 months, once their Google Checkout for Mobile service is more ready for the mainstream market.