140Char

Twitter marketer and celebrity Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) has come up with a great charity campaign over Christmas, having realised that just $2 from each of her followers would mean $25,000 – enough for a water project for a school or hospital by Charity Water.

The impetus for this is the fact that 5,000 children die every day from the lack of clean drinking water.

And as a bonus, if $10,000 plus gets raised, it’ll be matched by Tipjoy and Betaworks. Plus all fees are being waived for micropayments via Twitter for this case by Tipjoy.

But Laura puts it far more passionately and eloquently than I can (plus there are more details on the charity, payments, and even an easy form to use), so

• Go and visit the Well Wishes post on the Touchbase blog right now.

If that isn’t enough, Squidoo is also giving money to charity – Every time you tweet a message from the list of 21 charities, it’s a vote which means $1 is donated to that charity (one per person, per day), up to a maximum of $30,000.

Both might be slightly overshadowing my own Twitter charity pledge – @digitalmaverick and myself are racing to 2000 followers, with the loser doing a charity forfeit. Plus I’m giving £20 to a charity chosen by my 2000th follower!

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.