I had a friend “tweet” me a payment using twitpay this afternoon. I remember twitpay from earily in the year, but unlike my experiences with OboPay and Amazon Payments, sending a txt message or using a website to initiate a payment seem to be the easiest, thus I never signed up with twitpay, I also believe that it was in a early beta as the time as well, and honestly I thought it was silly, why would I use twitter to send payments when there are other working models that I’ve used. But with me being in the payments space and some what of an early adopter, I think I’l give it a shot the next few times I need to pay friends back for lunch.

twitpay uses the Amazon Payments Infrastructure, so you need to create an Amazon Payments Account and link your DDA and or Credit/Debit Cards Numbers to it. As a user of Amazon Payments as an alternative to using Obopay (I found it cheaper and there was less nagging verification) I didn’t need to perform this step.

How to use twitpay. It is easy — just tweet:

@dbergert twitpay $5.00 for lunch money

This would pay the user dbergert (this is me btw) $5.00 with a comment of “for lunch money”

In order for the recipient to claim their payment, they need to be a twitter user, and first follow the twitpay user, and then “Claim” your twitter account, which will result in a PIN that is DM’ed (Direct Messaged) to you from twitpay. then you can see what amounts your are owed, and then you also have the ability to send payments as well. When you want to settle up ? which doesn’t appear to be automatic, you click on the settle-up button to initiate the funds transfer from your Amazon Payments Account to the Recipients Amazon Payments Account. twitpay charges a nickel for transactions over $1.00 to settle.

Give it shot, It is a neat unique way of quickly paying a friend for something, I’m not sure if it works with DM’s so you should note that any payment that you make currently with twitpay are public to those who can read your twitter updates.

I’ve sent a few friends varying amounts between .50 and .75 this evening to see how useful it is, Honestly I’ll probably just use Amazon Payments txt or website interface, but who knows, let’s see how the experiment goes!

You need to configure a TwitterLogListener in your logger:

<log-listener class="org.jpos.util.TwitterLogListener">
 <property name="twitterUsername" value="paymentsystems" />
 <property name="twitterPassword" value="SuperSecretPassword" />
 <property name="tags" value="twitter" />
 <property name="prefix" value="[jPOS]"/>
 </log-listener>

And you need to Log an event with a ‘twitter’ tag:

<script name="test" logger="Q2">
     import org.jpos.util.*;
         for (int i=0; qbean.running(); i++) {
              LogEvent evt = log.createLogEvent ("twitter");
              evt.addMessage ("This is a Twitter message test from jPOS! " +   i);
              Logger.log (evt);
	           Thread.sleep (10000L);
       }
</script>

Look at the messages in a twitter account: http://twitter.com/paymentsystems

For more details on this see this post: http://is.gd/eDbI

I have had similar experiences, posting that I subscribed to MAKE Magazine and Picked up an Arduino Duemilanove got me a direct reply, A few blog posts about MagTek’s Magne-Safe Reader, got me a email from a MagTek Engineer – he was likely using Google Alerts  My post on LastPass.com got a timely reply from LastPass.com — they were using Google Blog Search. I ran into an old friend I haven’t seen in 10 years or so, she asked me if I was on Facebook and that we could catch up using that. Simple. Companies can monitor the blog-o-sphere and social networks and adapt directly to customers, while users can network and expand their knowledge and contacts.

I’ve been using Twitter for over a year now, mostly as a way to keep track of colleagues and co-workers schedules and tasks, as well to update "What I’m doing" as well, and have received some interesting replies and met some new contacts and friends.

Any one have any other experiences to share ? You might learn a little from me, and I’ll learn a lot from you.