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Tipjoy (YC W08) now allows payments via Twitter
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- halo 18y agoI'm sure this wasn't 'inspired' by twitpay.me at all, released and announced here 15 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369568 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369568)
- ivey 18y agoThey say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so we at Twitpay are taking it as a compliment.
- webwright 18y agoWhich in turn, I'm sure wasn't inspired by this post here (June): http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/how-twitter-will-be-worth-a-billion-in-a-year http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/how-twitter-will-be-worth... Or maybe it came from one of the 1.2 million pages that has the phrase "twitter and payment" somewhere in it but no mention of twitpay: http://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+payment+-twitpay http://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+payment+-twitpay Or inspired by TextPayMe, which did the exact same thing with phone numbers instead of twitter usernames? http://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/textpayme-welcome.png http://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/textpayme-welcome.p...
- ivey 18y agoActually, Nate's article (first link) was a direct inspiration for Twitpay.
- mattmaroon 18y agoI would imagine a feature like this would take more than 15 days to go from concept to launch, though perhaps not. They are a startup.
- ivankirigin 18y agoActually it took just a few days of work and we've considered it for months
- sanjayparekh 18y agoGuess that just goes to show you what competition will do in a space. If it took a few days of work, why didn't you do it before since you considered it "for months"? Oh wait, you waited until someone else did it and then decided to try it out. Well, guess the competition will help create some innovation in the space. Good for everyone in the end since I'm hoping the Twitpay team out executes.
- ivankirigin 18y agoSomeone else already did it. You shouldn't be so defensive http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/02/tipit-lets-you-transfer-money-over-twitter-sort-of/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/02/tipit-lets-you-transfer... Tipjoy is about more than payments in twitter. The main reason I'm excited about this is what it allows for services that use twitter, like http://www.stocktwits.com/ http://www.stocktwits.com/
- sarp 18y agoTwitpay launched in 2 days during Startup Weekend in Atlanta
- bdr 18y agoI'm sure it wasn't. Knowing the tipjoy people, I'm sure they've been planning this feature for longer than 15 days. It's pretty obvious in their space.
- callmeed 18y agoPutting aside the sarcasm and assuming it was inspired by twitpay, what exactly is the problem with that? Unless you also have a patented technology, being first to market doesn't really matter. Execution matters. Bragging rights don't pay the bills.
- ivey 18y agoNo one from Twitpay is complaining. Ivan gave me a heads-up about this a few days ago. TipJoy is a social platform for tipping people, that now has a Twitter hook. Twitpay is a payments platform built exclusively on Twitter, with some other interesting features in the works. It seems like overlap, but we're in pretty different spaces. I wish the discussion here had focused on TipJoy, and not veered off into this side of things...although I'm happy people know about Twitpay, too. We'll have our own HN threads for cool announcements soon enough. Congrats to Ivan and Abby for getting this out there.
- ntoshev 18y agoYou can define your market however you like, but as long as you fight over the same customers in the same context, you compete with each other. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that.
- ivankirigin 18y agoThe biggest threat to those that implement this functionality is twitter itself. If Twitter chooses to do their own payments, I doubt any efforts from Tipjoy or Twitpay could change behavior.
- drusenko 18y agowelcome to the real world. i can't tell you how many times people have taken UI and concepts we spent a ton of time developing and copied them directly, even some of our well funded competitors. even yahoo (they completely ripped off our theme choosing interface). hell, we've even had direct feature-for-feature copies of weebly commissioned in india. life's not fair, and neither is business. coming up with an idea isn't going to get you ahead, it's your ability to keep coming up with good ideas, execute on them, and make the right choices that steer the company that will. and eventually, some day, you get a big pile of users that becomes increasingly hard to lose, even if you try to fuck it up (just look at geocities. yes, it's still the 124th biggest site on the internet...)
- smahend 18y ago"inspired" is probably not the right word. i think directly stolen from twitpay is probably better
- calambrac 18y ago"Stolen", really? It's business, not super friendly fun time. Competition happens.
- ivankirigin 18y agoTipjoy is all about super friendly fun time. Like at our poker nights. Come by if you're in the Boston area (and a startup hacker/foudner): http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Startup-Poker/ http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Startup-Poker/
- gwc 18y agoWhat if you're not, but would like to be?
- lanceweatherby 18y agoCome up with a decent concept and team and then get funded by YC.
- mattmaroon 18y agoNice feature. I would use this if I frequented Twitter. I have sick friends who would throw money around like that for fun though.
- ivankirigin 18y agoYou tweet sometimes. They're usually pretty funny, so you should do it more. I'm pretty sure twitter will be closer to an ecosystem of tips, considering everyone is a "blogger" - though some with greater followings.
- mattmaroon 18y agoYeah, I log in a few times a week, and read whatever posts are on the first page. That's about it.
- juanpablo 18y agoToo many "pay words"! I don't know if that's the case but you should really check they aren't part of a casual tweet. Eg. "I'm not going to pay @joe $1000 for an old ipod!" or "Everyone! Give @bob $10 to buy beer".
- ivankirigin 18y agoWe thought of this. They need to be in the first 3 tokens. So this would indeed count, "Give @bob $10 to buy beer" but that is clearly a closer to a command. More importantly, this is an opt-in option, so it would be hard to do it without knowing.
- ivankirigin 18y agoI'm really excited about this because of where we can go with this. The idea of a "rtip" or tip/retweet is the biggest innovation here. It's exactly how twitter is already used to disperse information, but adds a social gesture with monetary weight. That's pretty powerful. If you like a tweet, just say "rtip $1 @username the awesome tweet". Lots of sites use Twitter credentials, and this means they can initiate payments. It also makes those payments inherently social, as they are broadcasted - so in ways it is better than an OAuth system. But we're planning that too. We are also accepted new signups via twitter credentials http://tipjoy.com/createaccount/platform/twitter/ http://tipjoy.com/createaccount/platform/twitter/ We're going to open this up to an API, meaning sites based on twitter credentials can convert their whole user base to tipjoy users. I'm really looking forward to see what can be done with these tools.
- omakase 18y agoThe potential for this idea is what got me excited the minute I saw your post. As an aside, I think twitter still needs to release support for OAuth, there are too many sites out there storing twitter credentials in plain text right now. Careful developers should be hashing the passwords with some secret salt so at least their users passwords aren't at risk if someone ever gains access to their db. These aren't really your issues, but twitter needs to add proper authentication. Anyways -- this is a great from tipjoy -- looking fwd to what comes next.
- nostrademons 18y agoThis is pretty cool. Congrats, TipJoys!
- bootload 18y ago"... Tipjoy now allows payments via Twitter ..." Go Abby & Ivan
- Dilpil 18y agoAm I the only one who is EXTREMELY skeptical that anyone is going to actually give out money using these applications?