Tipjoy Makes A Useful Premium Twitter App To Test Its Payments API

picture-310Say you have a group of individuals who all want to tweet from one account — right now, that’s a pain. You have to give everyone the password to the one account and have them log out of their own account and into this new one to use it. And even then, how do you know who is sending what tweet? You’d have to manually insert your own Twitter name at the end of your post or something along those lines. Now there’s a much easier way, and it comes thanks to a demo app.

Tata-tweet allows you to feed multiple Twitter accounts into one feed. When you do this, it will auto-append the name of the person tweeting to the end of the message. That means no more logging out from your account to send from the group account — and no more having to copy and paste the tweet if you also want to send it from your own. You can see this in action on the Y Combinator’s founders group account.

But there’s a slight catch: Using this app will cost you $0.99 a month. Yes, it’s a premium Twitter app. While those are a dime a dozen on platforms like the iPhone, they’re not so common on the web. And a monthly payment one is almost unheard of. But Tata-tweet is able to do it thanks to Tipjoy’s Twitter Payments API. This service extends Tipjoy’s social micropayment structure to the red-hot Twitter platform. And Tipjoy created this app to show exactly how it will work.

Pipping your accounts into Tata-tweet is easy, but you will have to have a group account set up that all of these tweets will be sent from. Once you have that, you click on the sign-up button and your TipJoy account is billed. It doesn’t require a credit card because TipJoy assumes that you’re good for the money. A word of caution: TipJoy will tweet out that you owe $5.94 (you have to sign up for 6 months at a time) for creating the new group account.

Tata-tweet is entirely open source, and you can grab the code at github. Tipjoy is running a contest through June 1 for the best apps created using this new Twitter Payments API — and according to TipJoy co-founder Ivan Kirigin, there are already plenty of good ones since Twitter is featuring it in the gadget box on the main Twitter homepage.

Kirigin bets that a lot of premium Twitter services will start popping up soon to make money on the popular platform. Yes, that will probably happen before Twitter actually makes any money.

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