Flattr appeared almost a year ago. At the time we called it “Facebook Like, but with money”. It’s a little like a wallet for spreading a little money love around, good for micropayments for content, blog posts and the like. At the end of the month your set stash of cash – as little a $2 a month – is split equally among the things you “flattrd”. Flattr is, in effect, a social micropayments platform.
Now Sweden’s second largest broadband provider, Bredbandsbolaget, a subsidiary of Telenor Sweden, is partnering up with Flattr.
The ISP will now allow Flattr account creation via their customer portal but also giving 1,000 new flattr customers 150 Swedish krona (about 15€) each, distributed over three months, to play with.
Some users, Flattr claims, are making as much as €2000 per month out of the service, though whether they are corporate and independent content creators is not clear.
This is a nice distribution deal for Flattr but I don’t see it powering the startup into the clouds.
What is much more significant is the tie-in to Twitter and a recent Soundcloud integration.
Those are the elements which could really make this big, and deals with ISPs seem like a time-consuming side-show compared to what they could do if they doubled-down on Twitter and other social nets.