TipJoy; Creators Vs. Value conduits

So TipJoy has been getting some press lately, which is good because I like it. While Clay Shirky apparently says Micropayments are dead I really like anything I can do immediately (in a very GTD). TipJoy makes it easy for me to share a small amount of love in a very instant gratification kind of a way.

I also like in a very startup style they are extremely responsive. I sent them a couple of points of feedback yesterday and by the time the sun started to rise over the America West Coast I had an answer and they had added something to the site. You can now look at who I’ve tipped and get it as a feed. They are also working on an API which hopefully I’ll get access to soon.

One thing I think would be interesting is to see if they can look at better granularity of claims against URLs. On some systems authors get ownership of a subdirectory rather than the whole domain. When I tip that URL do I want the tip to go to the author of the site or the owner of the domain? On a shared blog, if I tip a story I like am I tipping the blogger or the site? They shouldn’t have to resolve all these issues with some large unwieldily way of specifying who you were tipping. But, it is interesting to think about a URL or domain not necessarily not being an indicator of the creator of value but instead the identifier of the conduit of value.

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tipjoy, clayshirky, micropayment, micropayments, ycombinator