TipiT.to

I just wrote a comment at Techcrunch to explain why we think tipping does have a future and what we hope to do once we relaunch the site.

We’re back in more ways than one! Last week TipiT suffered an outage at the data center we’re located at. Downtime like this never comes at a convenient moment, but this was particularly bothersome since we were busy preparing things for our relaunch with new design and payment options.

Everything on the server was redundant, but we still needed to get at the disk physically. Having done this and recovered everything, we figured that the inflexibility of a physical computer was hindering us more than it was helping us. So we moved our stuff over to Amazon and ensured such facilities that if Amazon were to be unreachable (unlikely, but still…) we can be back up and running quicker at a different host, than we have been this time.

So, we’re back but having dealt with this, we’re going to be back even better shortly. More on that in a later post.

We attended the Music and Innovation event at Noorderslag in Groningen to talk about new developments in Tipit.to and to get feedback from the music scene about the concept.

Big thanks to Lykle and New Music Labs for hosting us.

Running a startup or any other kind of small creative company in the Netherlands is an interesting experience, but it poses its own share of hurdles which in large part are unnecessary. On my own blog, I posted an article summarizing all the friction you need to overcome to get some office space.

To help startups in the Netherlands overcome these obstacles and join their efforts together the STIKK foundation has been founded, which Tipit will be joining in the near future.

Two notable new tipjars on Tipit.to this week:

PluginAudio.net — a site which seems to be about audio plugins as far as I can tell put up a tipjar and got a big flurry of initial visitors and tips. This kind of community knowledge site is exactly the stuff we envision Tipit supporting.

Spotlight Effect Movember — some friends in Amsterdam decided to participate in Movember this year (and I’m joining them). They put up a tipjar all proceeds of which will go to the Dutch cancer foundation.

So much for this week. Keep the tips coming!

It’s been a bit quiet around here. We’re self-funded so sometimes we need to do other things to make money. Nevertheless we’re busy with a ton of things for Tipit.to and a tiny one for this blog post is Feedburner integration.

You can use the following link as a FeedFlare:
https://tipit.to/pages/tipitFeedFlare.xml

That will automatically create a link to tip the domain of the accompanying feed item. If you do not own the domain of your blog, you can use the following:

https://tipit.to/pages/tipitFeedFlare.xml/tipjarname

to point to the tipjar name the tips should go to.

Note: To add a FeedFlare in Feedburner go to the Optimize tab of your feed and in the FeedFlare service add the appropriate URL.

We hope you like it and if you have any other integrations which you feel we should be working on, do not hesitate to let us know.

Seth Godin writes a brief blog post that ads are the new online tipjar. I would like to disagree first and foremost because ads are not the new online tipjar, tipjars are.

Secondly ads are a strange thing. They are a semi-interested third party that meddles into your interaction with a site with this interjection: “Hey, you liked STUFF! Maybe you want to buy my discounted and improved STUFF. Click here and get your credit card ready.”

Many site owners for reasons of taste do not want to put ads on their website. Adding commercial messages to what is a very personal publication may not feel right to them not to mention that it could display messages not completely to your liking.

Add to this the fact that very few websites make significant ad income. This may be because as Seth claims it is not ingrained yet in us to click on an ad every time we read something interesting but a more importantly factor is the willingness of the sponsor to pony up money.
You need to be writing very focusedly about very specific subjects to be able to generate significant income. The amount of money you get is not determined by the value of your content to your visitor but on the value of the goods your advertisers thinks they can sell through your site. And Google of course takes a cut.

Clicking on stuff to fake your attention would get quite tedious. Remember those make-money-while-browsing-by-watching-ads-schemes? This proposal makes you watch advertising to make money for other people (if the site owners did it themselves it would constitute click fraud). And this scheme definitely does not work for Cost per Action models where people receive a kickback based on actual sales.

We at Tipit.to envision a web where a rich ecosystem of free content flourishes as it already does currently but where it is easy and indeed an accepted protocol for people consuming that content to give back if they wish, when they wish and as much as they wish.

CC photograph by Karen Ang

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.