I really hadn’t been following the whole TipJoy thing since I never saw the point to it, and still don’t, but something in a post by Peter Kafka at D|All Things Digital caught my eye . While his post centered on some questions about how TipJoy was closed down just after Facebook pulled a deal to buy them only to have one of the founders end up as a Facebook employee I was more interested in another little tidbit.
At the bottom of his post Peter quotes a portion of the closing out post at the TipJoy blog where husband and wife team, Ivan and Abby Kirigins, behind the startup suggest that services like Twitter and Facebook should be the ones to launch payment services – not 3rd party startups like TipJoy.
When we evaluate why there’s been so much hype about payments on Twitter, and yet so little traction for us (and even far less for our competitors) it is clear to us that the reason is that a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party. “Simple, social payments” is *the* philosophy needed to do digital payments right, but once a service groks that, they need only to implement it on their own. We’ve been the thought leaders in this space, we see the hype and excitement, and yet we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments – then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.
While this seems more than self-servicing considering the closure of TipJoy and Ivan being hired by Facebook before the closure was announced it does raise an interesting question.
Could, or should, Twitter consider the possibility of adding a payment system – possibly as a premium service; and if they did would it gain traction?
