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.

So that’s it, we’re live. A lot of work remains to be done though.

The site in its current form is pretty stable but we’ll be adding two important things in the next couple of days:

• An aggregated list of popular sites to the front page, so you can drop by and see what’s hot right now.
• A rich and secure widget with which you can tip without leaving the parent website.

Lots of other stuff can also be improved. Your feedback is very valuable and tells us what to focus on. Expect to see many of these things fixed in the following days.

That’s it for now. Happy tipping.