Author(s):

Guillaume Lebleu

In 140 characters:

RTip combines a RT and a gift of currency (virtual or hard).

Description:

The RT is the currency of appreciation on Twitter, but it does not allow users to reward the users they retweet with government-issued or virtual currency. To do so, users have to rely on third-party services such as TipJoy, WikiWikiMoney, Twitpay or Twollars, which can track their RTips on Twitter and process transaction accordingly.

Details and Use Cases:

Giving currency to a Twitter user as part of a RT:

RTip [amount][currency-code] @[username] ...  or RTip [currency-code][amount] @[username]

or more simply

RT [amount][currency-code] @[username] ...  or RT [currency-code][amount] @[username]

Currency codes defined:

• $ (USD)
• Tw (Twollars)

Examples:

RTip $2 @giyom for...

RTip 2Tw @giyom for...

RT $2 @giyom for...

RT 2Tw @giyom for...

Comments on Application Integration

Users must make sure that they are not using two different payment managers for the same currency, otherwise a transaction may be duplicated. This problem hasn't surfaced so far because Tipjoy and Twitpay use different syntaxes and Twollars/Wikiwikimoney currently do not deal with government-issued currency. This is also not a problem if all payments in a given currency are always available to all payment managers (this isn't the case for USDs; it has been the case for Twollars thus far but is no longer the case since the API).

Alternatives

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