I've often wondered what Pandora's Box was supposed to have looked like. If you listen to historians, it actually was a jar not a box. But I'm not here to split hairs about that...

We could be looking at a Pandora's Box situation and it involves the upstart social platform, Twitter. A 'tip' service that goes by the name tipjoy has integrated their API into Twitter. The next logical question to ask is... What is tipjoy?

It's a micro-transaction service that allows people to provide different people/websites with small tips. They can be charitable donations, or payments for services. Or you could just really like the site, and want to see it succeed. Up until today the service was just available for an actual site.

Now, tipjoy has allowed the ability to setup transactions through Twitter. Let the games begin. If you want to read about how the system works, visit this page. I don't want to dwell on those details, but rather what could become of the service. Hence my reference to Pandora's Box/Jar.

tipjoy cites a few uses for the serivce and they do make sense. First, is the selling of actual products like buying a song or video. Instead of having to setup complicated code on your site, you just tweet the transaction and it's done for you. Starving musicians rejoice! The next use is for services which I mentioned. Finally, the Twitter transcations can go to charitable causes and organizations.

These sound like some wonderful concepts but of course the negatives must be debated as well. The most obvious red flag has to be the potential for scams. It's easy to setup a professional Twitter page, and make it look like Little Johnny needs money for a kidney transplant. Then Johnny runs away to Cancun with the donations (probably should have used a name other than Johnny).

The online marketing consequences could be substantial as well. The balances for accounts are public, so you can see who's taking in the most transactions. This could lead to a swell of sites seeing increased traffic due to hype from their large tipjoy accounts. That's a hypothetical, but I'd really like to hear your ideas of the possibilities of tipjoy. Feel free to shoot me an email, or start a discussion topic on the forums.

| JohnnyV |