July 2nd, 2008
TipiT adds payment pledges to Twitter
While not quite the Twitter mobile payments idea I wrote about yesterday, TipiT, a payment service designed for websites that want to add a ‘tip jar’ feature, has already added Twitter integration.
First up, current users of TipiT can now link their accounts to Twitter so that they’ll receive a notification in the form of a ‘tweet’ everytime somebody makes a donation to their tip jar. Additionally, a tweet is sent out in your name whenever you tip somebody.
The second and more ambitious feature is the ability to pledge tips via Twitter itself. To do this TipiT adds its own syntax to Twitter’s existing machine code:
You can use the twitter messaging service to make tips to tipjars, sites and even to twitter users using the following commands:
d tipit tipjarname 50 Have a nice day!
or
d tipit @twittername 50 Thanks for the updates!
So it’s “d tipit TARGET AMOUNT MESSAGE” where the message is optional. Not too hard to remember and quite powerful.
However, as TechCrunch notes, sending a TipiT tweet doesn’t actually transfer any funds: “Instead, it sends you an email message telling you to pony up your money through PayPal, which is then directed towards the intended recipient.”
To-date, the company claims that Titter-initiated pledges have resulted in a 70% conversion rate. Though TechCrunch thinks this could become lower with scale if the feature takes off.
So, should Twitter get into the online payments game itself? As one commenter suggested on my previous post, a better solution maybe to charge third parties access to the needed security API on which they can built or integrate fully, Twitter-based mobile payments systems of their own .
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
