140Char

Rather than making money from Twitter advertising, Twitpay allows you to transfer money to any other Twitter user with a simple Tweet.

'Money' by jenn_jenn on Flickr (CC Licence)

Send an @ message, for example ‘@badgergravling twitpay $5 for running 140char.com’ or via the twitpay site.

Adding funds to Twitpay can be done via Paypal, and if you’ve got over $10 in your account, you can spend it as an Amazon gift card, a donation to a Twitpay charity, or to Twitpay itself - meanwhile the service takes a flat rate of $0.01 for every $1

It’s a stunningly simple idea to have a ‘Paypal for Twitter’, that came out of a startup weekend. You can read more about how the idea came about on the FAQs page.

What’s interesting is that this is a new approach to providing a monetisable service via Twitter, and possibly creating a new Twitter economy. The main question will be whether enough people have an urge or reason to transfer money to someone on Twitter leaving to use an existing service - and whether more business ideas will appear now the facility is available.

For instance, considering you can place a coffee order via Twitter, perhaps Twitpay could let you pay for it instantly as well, without the need for cash or a debit card?

Edit: Just discovered an alternative in Tipjoy, which also allows for payment via Twitter messages.

In a slightly bizarre move, blogging platform Six Apart (Movable Type, Typepad and Vox) has acquired Pownce  for an undisclosed sum - and it’s immediately been announced Pownce will be closed on December 15th, 2008 - just two weeks away.

The news has been revealed on the offical Pownce blog ‘Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart‘, written by Leah Culver:

” We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all….

*snip*

We’ll be closing down the main Pownce website two weeks from today, December 15th. Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.

For our Pro members, we’ll be emailing you soon with more information about your Pro account.”

The post explains Mike Malone and Leah Culver will join Six Apart’s engineering team. Anthony Ha at VentureBeat has said that Digg founder Kevin Rose and Digg employee Daniel Burka who were also responsible for Digg will now be advisors to Six Apart.

The official Six Apart blog offers those who paid for a Pownce Pro account a free Typepad account for a year.

You can see some of the latest messages from users on the Pownce homepage.

You can see the responses from Twitter users on the Pownce closure.

There’s a FriendFeed room set up for PownceExiles to reconnect.

Interestingly, @nickdawson has spotted: http://postpownce.com/ - could be official or fan created. The Whois lookup isn’t particularly helpful, but it looks slightly unofficial so far.

Meanwhile, there’s a surprisingly amount of people using Pownce as normal, although there’s obviously a significant number who are either thanking the Pownce team, or expressing their anger - and it seems like users are mainly migrating to Twitter, with a few mentions of FriendFeed.

Strangely, Twitter has the mass user group and VC funding, but Pownce had direct revenue streams already in place, with paid membership upgrades and advertising.Meanwhile Jaiku, Plurk, Identi.ca etc are all continuing, as far as I’m aware, without a mass surge in users or a revenue model that has been revealed. Will any other microblogging services be under threat in the coming months?

I’ve blogged about my lack of enthusiasm for Digg several times over at TheWayoftheWeb, but I don’t think it’s necessarily about the Pownce team ‘failing’ - it’s likely that the impending financial situation, and an attractive offer may have been too tempting to turn down. But it does reinforce my opinion of Kevin Rose’s companies as lacking a bit of customer service - two weeks for people to leave Pownce and shut the door behind them isn’t particularly accomodating.

You can see part of the justification for the closure:

It may be U.S. traffic only, but it’s a pretty fair representation.

Interestingly, from a closer look at the numbers, it suggests that from the ‘big four’, Jaiku would be the next logical service for the chopping block - with Plurk leading the ‘Everything except for Twitter’ group.

My two thoughts are that perhaps the team behind Pownce weren’t seeing the growth they hoped for, and with Twitter being open about monetizing next year, it seemed a good time to exit with some money.

And that perhaps the move to greater federation (e.g. Facebook Connect etc), and aggregation (posting via clients or apps to multiple locations), the prospects of success for a relatively small microblogging platform were diminishing - especially with new services offering the chance to set up private groups (Twingr.com), and services like Drop.io simplifying file sharing.

From a personal point of view, the file sharing aspect wasn’t enough for me to devote enough time on Pownce to build a big community, but I did enjoy popping in for short visits on occasion, and I’m definitely sad to see any microblogging/microsharing service closed suddenly, and without any warning.

There have been lots of reports on the Techcrunch50 startup conference/competition, and lots of coverage of Yammer winning the top prize.

It takes the Twitter model, and asks ‘What are you working on’ for enterprise, so a private Twitter for companies. It’s free to use for employees, but the business model kicks in if a company wants to claim their network and get administrative tools to remove messages and users, set password policies, or set IP ranges for who can use it.

So far so good - as always, I’m reserving my judgement until I get to sit and play with it - which I’m about to start doing for a fun little project. One of my main concerns is about the scale of take-up. A comparison between Facebook and Twitter shows microblogging is far from ubiquitous.

With this in mind, will there be enough scale within enough companies to make it worthwhile for companies, and also to show enough revenue to make sense? The natural audience is in the global technology companies, but beyond that, it might be somewhat limited as a mechanism for people with 6 employees signed up and the rest ignoring it.

It will also be intriguing to see how it works across departments, and particularly across verticals. Will people interact in a meaningful way if the management are seeing every message (Yam?). Will it lead to decisions becoming slowed by  Death by Committee as everyone seeks to put in their opinion?

For me, there are too many questions to predict whether it will be successful or not. Within a large UK organisation I’ve seen Facebook rocket in popularity for social use but fail to get traction for business use. Meanwhile LinkedIn has again grown, but as a tool for external contacts rather than questions and interaction. One company in one country isn’t exactly a representative survey, but even within the hardcore of early adopters who embrace social networking (and indeed microblogging), I’m not sure there’s enough conversation to necessitate Yammer over email/instant messaging/forums.

Still the $50,000 Techcrunch prize is more money than a lot of social networks have achieved, so they’re off to a good start!

It took me a couple of passes to get the value of Blip.fm as opposed to existing streaming radio online like last.fm. At first, for some reason, it wasn’t running properly and playing each track in turn for me, which didn’t help! But now it’s becoming a great way to discover new music recommended by my friends, even if I normally revert to streaming my last.fm library for longer periods. The two compliment each other is the same way as someone like John Peel complimented by record collection, but I couldn’t always make it through an entire show before some obscure German techno forced me to change radio station.

Blip.fm helps me find new music by effectively allowing users to Twitter with each song they choose, giving it some context, or publicly proclaiming their love for it etc. And I can aggregate these choices into my own list, give ‘props’ to other users for good choices, and filter the overall stream via my friends, just as I would with Twitter.

Where it might give a clue to revenue streams for microblogging is in offering the direct link to buy any track as an MP3 via Amazon. So if I like a particular track or artist, the opportunity to make a quick impulse purchase is always there - and it’s backed up by allowing me to listen to the track based on recommendations by my friends.

The only weakness is that not every track is available, and I need to be aware that I want to listen to this track offline, in my car, on an Ipod, at the time that I’m experiencing it…or be able to find it easily, and at the moment there’s no way to search my Playlist, or add individual songs to my Amazon wishlist.

But if what if this model was more widely applied - to offline magazines and books for example. And to products as well? One Twitter Affiliates scheme which wasn’t tied into a sole retailer, but operated as an aggregation service to allow me to recommend almost anything, and offer a direct link?

It’s probably the quickest and simplest method of monetising the Twitterati. And people can be persuaded to link their recommendations to returns for themselves or even for charity, as something like Squidoo shows.

It would be possible to test the theory if individuals listed book recommendations etc via existing Amazon etc affiliate accounts, but this may lead to confusion and disappointment if it isn’t flagged up as such before an unsuspecting user follows the link - but Twitter and the extra 20 characters could flag referral posts quickly and uniformly.

The only question for me is who tries it first - Twitter, or an enterprising external team? Anyone know a good developer?

We’ve got a new section to highlight and collate all of the best case studies of business and enterprise using microblogging in one place, as well as in individual blog posts. As the list fills up, you’ll be able to see it all, here.

Starting off is an example of customer service on Twitter as David Cushman recently posted.

David tweeted about his problem signing up to Qik on his Nokia N73. He didn’t contact the company directly, and probably would have just given up if left to his own devices. But Jackie Danicki, Director of Marketing at Qik was monitoring what was being said, found the tweet, and also located David’s email address to contact him directly, as well as sending him an SMS with a relevant link. Which led to him posting in praise of the company even before a solution was provided to his problem.

One happy advocate blogging about his experience and sharing his recommendations on and offline before he’s even tried the product!