Discover the new TipJoy.com: Micropayment on Twitter Universe
TipJoy.com was founded in early 2008 with $1m venture funding from YCombinator’s. TechCrunch first reviewed it on Feb. 2008, the app/site has seen some traffic surge lately, standing at 80k alexa ranking as of this blog post. I discover the site today (yeah the weather is gorgeous, but I am happier working on numerous twitter project, twitter is even more gorgeous to me.) through a simple search on twitter: guess what, socialtext.com is running CPC ads for its twitterprise seminar series. Laura Fitton, aka @Pistachio, is one of the advisers for TipJoy. I thought twice before clicking on it since I was not sure it’s related to twitter by reading the name. I am glad I did.
In its own word: Tipjoy is a simple, social payments service which makes it easy for people to earn money from and give money to great people, causes and content.
First impression: TipJoy.com is a winner. I was literally “wowed”, honestly, I have never thought about that idea of micropayment. It’s super easy to use with crisp design (not surprised since the husband/wife founders @ikirigin CTO and @abbyxmix CEO are strong on both design/development).
You can pay other twitters and also get paid. The payment back end goes through Paypal. Paying others is super easy as long as you have some funds in Paypal. To get paid, e.g., ask donation for you blog/application or any other cause, you need to grab a simple “pay” button and install it in your blog, which is a snap. You will receive a payment receipt from paypal indicating Ivan Kirigin from TipJoy is the merchant.
TipJoy will also show your recent transactions on your account home page. Since I do have $5 sitting in paypal account for ever, I thought to give it a try by donating $2 to @wellwishes, which to my surprise, already got $19,765 from 676 twitters. Wow. That is $30/twitter. Really?
I am not sure about the business model behind TipJoy but there could be so many ways to do this. Following is some of the screenshot (of the click flow I went through). This blog entry took me about 1 hour to complete from discovering TipJoy to publishing it. If you like it, drop me a quarter and test out TipJoy 
Tipjoy home page before Sign in
TipJoy: after signing in with Twitter account @theReviewGuy
Tipjoy Direct Message with Sign in Password (I changed it, u wish!)
TipJoy: make money
Tipjoy button that you need
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