TipiT.to

One of the big features that we have been working on for the last couple of weeks is integrating Tipit.to’s flow with Twitter. We think Twitter despite its many outages is an important messaging platform and it is possible to build very useful applications on top of it.

What you can do is to go to your settings page and link your Twitter account to your Tipit.to account. After you’ve done this, you can:

1. Make Tipit.to send you tweets when you get tipped and send tweets out in your name whenever you tip somebody.
   
2. You can use the twitter messaging service to make tips to tipjars, sites and even to twitter users using the following commands:
   d tipit tipjarname 50 Have a nice day!
   or
   d tipit @twittername 50 Thanks for the updates!
   So it’s “d tipit TARGET AMOUNT MESSAGE” where the message is optional. Not too hard to remember and quite powerful. 

   You can send these messages from the Twitter website, a client or even from your mobile phone. So that means that tipping can go offline and if you know the tipjar name, you can tip whatever you want whenever you want it.

One important thing to note is that our interface to Twitter is best effort and limited more by Twitter’s stability than our own. We do our best to relay your message and in the event that something goes wrong we will both notify you and queue your request to try again after a reasonable pause.

We think that Twitter integration brings two important things to tipping. A more fluid way of making tips and publishing your tips to your Twitter audience, so that tipping can go wider faster. And a way to take the concept of tipping offline using any mobile phone’s SMS capability to interface to Twitter.

We recently added a thermometer widget so you can ask your readers to pledge tips for a goal. We have thermometers in a large vertical version and in a smaller horizontal variant, both of which are visible below:

You can reach the thermometer configuration from your tipjar page along with the other widgets and get the code necessary to paste it anywhere you want.

More stuff coming, but do let us know what you think about this.

Tipit.to would like to congratulate Gerard van Enk with the launch of his new site for his daily news publication the gvenk daily. Gerard has been summarizing the news in Dutch every day on his twitter account for a while now. With the gvenk daily site he has built this out into a more complete publishing and distribution platform powered by twitter.

The gvenk daily site has a Tipit button for support so we would like to wish Gerard best of luck with his work and urge you all to go and leave him a nice tip.