This suggests that what Kiva users are really doing is financing the microfinance institutions themselves and not individual entrepreneurs. Kiva argues, however, that any confusion disappears come repayment time.

Whether you get your money back later will depend on whether the people to whom you directed your money repay it. If they don’t, you’ll get nothing unless the local microfinance partner makes good on the loan to stay in Kiva and its users’ good graces.

MICROPLACE Kiva lenders don’t collect interest but are supposed to get their principal back. Individual lenders who use MicroPlace can actually make a small profit.

Like Kiva, MicroPlace draws investors in with stories of ice cream start-ups in Nigeria and such. But it clearly labels each featured individual as a sample borrower. “We don’t make any claims that you are investing in a person,” said Ashwini Narayanan, MicroPlace’s general manager. “You’re investing in a microfinance lender.”

Those lenders are willing to pay a return for access to capital, and MicroPlace investors can aim at investments that can yield up to 6 percent a year. Ms. Narayanan said she hoped that more people would eventually see the site not through the lens of philanthropy but as a portal to an entirely new asset class, like stocks or certificates of deposit, that can also do a lot of good.

MicroPlace isn’t a nonprofit, like the other sites I’ve discussed here. But it pledges to give away any money it makes, say through eBay’s foundation.

As for the lack of a direct connection between lenders and entrepreneurs, MicroPlace makes no apologies. For MicroPlace (or Kiva) to fulfill such a promise completely, people would have to collect requests for loans by hand, translate and post those requests on the Web along with any supporting photos or videos, wait to see if lenders finance them, distribute the money to the field partners and then wait for the partners to make loans to the people who requested them, many of whom live far away from one another.