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Comment by halo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this wasn't 'inspired' by twitpay.me at all, released and announced here 15 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369568)

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Which in turn, I'm sure wasn't inspired by this post here (June):

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/how-twitter-will-be-worth...

Or maybe it came from one of the 1.2 million pages that has the phrase "twitter and payment" somewhere in it but no mention of twitpay:

http://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+payment+-twitpay

Or inspired by TextPayMe, which did the exact same thing with phone numbers instead of twitter usernames?

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/textpayme-welcome.p...

Actually, Nate's article (first link) was a direct inspiration for Twitpay.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so we at Twitpay are taking it as a compliment.

With compliments like that, who needs insults?

Out of curiosity, how much money has Twitpay sent around so far? (not counting the founders, of course :p)

welcome to the real world. i can't tell you how many times people have taken UI and concepts we spent a ton of time developing and copied them directly, even some of our well funded competitors. even yahoo (they completely ripped off our theme choosing interface). hell, we've even had direct feature-for-feature copies of weebly commissioned in india. life's not fair, and neither is business.

coming up with an idea isn't going to get you ahead, it's your ability to keep coming up with good ideas, execute on them, and make the right choices that steer the company that will. and eventually, some day, you get a big pile of users that becomes increasingly hard to lose, even if you try to fuck it up (just look at geocities. yes, it's still the 124th biggest site on the internet...)

I'm sure it wasn't. Knowing the tipjoy people, I'm sure they've been planning this feature for longer than 15 days. It's pretty obvious in their space.

I would imagine a feature like this would take more than 15 days to go from concept to launch, though perhaps not. They are a startup.

Actually it took just a few days of work and we've considered it for months

Guess that just goes to show you what competition will do in a space. If it took a few days of work, why didn't you do it before since you considered it "for months"? Oh wait, you waited until someone else did it and then decided to try it out. Well, guess the competition will help create some innovation in the space. Good for everyone in the end since I'm hoping the Twitpay team out executes.

Someone else already did it. You shouldn't be so defensive http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/02/tipit-lets-you-transfer...

Tipjoy is about more than payments in twitter. The main reason I'm excited about this is what it allows for services that use twitter, like http://www.stocktwits.com/

Twitpay launched in 2 days during Startup Weekend in Atlanta

Putting aside the sarcasm and assuming it was inspired by twitpay, what exactly is the problem with that?

Unless you also have a patented technology, being first to market doesn't really matter.

Execution matters. Bragging rights don't pay the bills.

No one from Twitpay is complaining. Ivan gave me a heads-up about this a few days ago.

TipJoy is a social platform for tipping people, that now has a Twitter hook.

Twitpay is a payments platform built exclusively on Twitter, with some other interesting features in the works.

It seems like overlap, but we're in pretty different spaces. I wish the discussion here had focused on TipJoy, and not veered off into this side of things...although I'm happy people know about Twitpay, too. We'll have our own HN threads for cool announcements soon enough.

Congrats to Ivan and Abby for getting this out there.

You can define your market however you like, but as long as you fight over the same customers in the same context, you compete with each other.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with that.

The biggest threat to those that implement this functionality is twitter itself. If Twitter chooses to do their own payments, I doubt any efforts from Tipjoy or Twitpay could change behavior.

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