giantrobotlasers:

Tipjoy is shutting down.

You can still sign in and cash out funds. We’ve also made it easy to download all your transaction history. But all other functionality on the site is now turned off.

If you have a positive balance, you will soon receive a formal notification describing the shutdown process, which will include a reasonable deadline before which you will need to claim your funds.

If you have any questions about your account, send us email: help@tipjoy.com

We have decided against continuing to pursue additional funding. After a long and hard look at the market and the situation, we didn’t feel it made sense.

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.

Thank you to everyone who has supported and helped us along the way.

This sucks.  I maintain still that the interface designers need to get on this.  I disagree that the major players are needed to make this happen.  Client designers who can integrate all these social networks and cool little toys have a land-rush situation in front of them.  Whoever can figure out how to put it all together, with micro-payments a natural part of the “one stream” paradigm, will change everything.   I don’t see Twitter and Facebook being competitors at all.  Tweets should be protocol. Twitter can become the backbone of Web 3, if it figures this out.