Tipjoy has opened up an API which can power payments for Twitter applications. There are are lots of exciting ways to use it; here are some ideas to get you started:

E-commerce over twitter - sell your content: mp3s, videos, text, whatever

p $1 http://music-site.com/good-song.mp3 because I love this band

Premium content and premium services

p $2 @tweetie to get your awesome iPhone app

Microgiving for causes and non-profits

p $2 @charitywater to help build wells for those without clean drinking water

P2P payments

p $9 @abbyxmix thanks for lunch - you’re awesome

Because Twitter is a broadcast platform, these payments are social. That’s very valuable. A microgiving cause gets the benefit of all the user’s followers seeing the payment. A premium twitter app paid using Tipjoy gets a free advertisement on Twitter. It’s not an orchestrated “social media marketing” effort - it’s real people actually using your service.

There are a few common patterns in the payments in each of these use cases. We’ve broken them out into API calls, and opened them up to you, the delightful Twitter developer:

A twitter application enables their users to use Tipjoy for payments by first automatically creating a Tipjoy account to link to their Twitter account. By sending Tipjoy the user’s Twitter username and password with this call, an application can create a Tipjoy account that “owns” that Twitter account. Payments sent from a Twitter account will debit the associated Tipjoy account, and payments sent to that Twitter account will credit the associated Tipjoy account.

Making a payment involves posting a tweet, e.g. ‘p $2 @ev’. Here are the formatting rules. If that is posted straight to Twitter, Tipjoy will quickly record the transaction by using the Twitter search & REST APIs. That is an asynchronous process, not immediate.

If you require a real-time transaction, or you have content for which payment is required for access, you can post a tweet through Tipjoy using this call. We’ll make sure the payment is properly formatted, and tell you whether the transaction has been paid.

If unpaid, record the transaction_id we provide, so you can check again later to see if the transaction has been paid. If the user has just joined Tipjoy, they’ll need to fill up their account via PayPal to follow through on the payment.

We’re working on credit card and checking account support. Applications will be able to host a form to let the user tell Tipjoy their credit card or checking account information. They’ll then have their accounts periodically debited to fulfill their payments, and won’t need to use PayPal.

Paying through PayPal involves creating a link to sign in the user, which will then redirect them to PayPal. On Tipjoy, /GoPay will redirect the user straight to PayPal if they have a negative balance, or to /BuyMore otherwise. /BuyMore will allow a user with a positive balance to add more money to their Tipjoy account.

You can check the Tipjoy balance using this call. For a mandated payment, you can avoid checking whether the transaction has been fulfilled by requiring the user to pre-fill their Tipjoy balance. So there are two flows possible:

1. 1. Make a pledge. 2. Fill up the account, if needed. 3. Verify the transaction is paid, and provide the content.
2. 1. Check the user balance. 2. Fill up the account, if needed. 3. Verify the new account balance, and initiate the payment.

Each of the above examples of different kinds of payments can be powered by this process. We’ll post code from an example application soon.

If you have any questions or feature requests, let us know! You can also join the Tipjoy Developer mailing list.