Last week we saw the launch of Tipit.to, the Dutch startup by Reinier, Jeroen and Alper. Tipit is a webservice that allows anyone to give a small tip (starting at 1 cent) to anyone. Tips are aggregated before payed and a similar system is used for payout. This makes it way more easier to pay a tip using Tipit than having to go through the PayPal process for every 10 cents you want to pay someone.

Why tips?

So why would you leave tips? Well honestly there are numerous reasons, but I always like to think about it as a good anti-advertisement measure. Most sites show Google Ads simply because the income they get from it pay for the server bills, which doesn’t mean they feel happy to have to show their users advertisement. Instead, a Tipit button on a website could allow users to make simple and easy donations, eliminating the need of advertisement.

Creative uses

There are obviously other reasons to have a tipjar besides preventing advertisements, and since the launch last week we have already seen a few uses that were pretty creative. The most notable is Lauren, who’s house burned down and is now looking for some money to get his life back on track (photos and videos here, or tip him here).

How to join?

Setting up your own tipjar is pretty easy, just go to Tipit.to, sign up, create a tipjar, and place the nice button on your site. In contrary to other services like Paypal they don’t need an awful lot of info about you before you can set up an account, and in contrary to services like TipJoy they pay out real money.

Is tipping the future?

I personally think we will see more and more tipping in the future. Tipping is the logical extend of the currently increased social activity on the web. Recent research shows that people are clicking less and less on advertisements and honestly I think we all hate to see them around anyway. Add on top of this that many people are starting to feel more and more invested in the sites they use day in and day out (see Flickr users vs the Yahoo/MS news), and tipping is definitely going to be hot in 2008.

I was having a very interesting talk with Ian and Glyn yesterday during dinner about the DataPortability workgroup. I can start explaining what the idea of data portability is, but I think that this next video explains way more. Let me just say that Google, Facebook and Plaxo recently joined for a good reason.

(more…)

Just finished reading (and listening to) “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. I know I am not the first person to read this book but eventually I had to read it anyway so better late than never. It was an interesting read and it served me well in my research paper. For all of you who haven’t read the book yet nor know about the concept of The Long Tail, I advise you to take a look at the official site or the wikipedia article.

Up next: The Theory of Relativity, Freakonomics, and Randomness.