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