Google Launches New Service - TipJar: a collection of money saving tips | Hacker News Reader

Google Launches New Service - TipJar: a collection of money saving tips

moderator.appspot.com

19 pointsvaksel17 comments

The title, though factually correct, is quite misleading. It's like saying Google launches interactive Python shell service at http://shell.appspot.com

The real service is Google Moderator: http://moderator.appspot.com/

TipJar is just a featured series on Google Moderator, just like the Shell is a featured application on the App Engine. It looks like Google 'seeded' Moderator with Tipjar, along with several other moderated discussions.

Yeah, I'd like to see the title tweaked a bit to clarify that, too.

I was thinking "Oh, its that Amazon Honor System (allowing people to make donations to folks who put a button on their website, for example bloggers) all over again", except no. Its a "One guy writes up a money saving tip, other people vote it up".

Here's my tip: neither the technology nor the content is interesting.

Sample: Pay your bills online to save on postage or Take advantage of free entertainment in your community – parks, museums, exhibits, etc. Go to free park concerts and other community activities.

Yup, it's definitely not winning any awards for insight. One of the current top tips: "Bring your lunch to work once or twice a week instead of buying it."

I agree -- and my tips are up there (iwillteachyoutoberich). It's hard to say anything useful in that small amount of space.

When I saw the title, I was afraid that this was a tipjoy competitor from Google.

Same here. My heart skipped a beat.

Technically, Google Checkout is already a Tipjoy competitor. We worry about Amazon much more than G.Checkout & PayPal.

On the note of Tipjoy, thanks for making it. It's allowed me to take donations on my site without which I wouldn't've been able to otherwise (Due to PayPal's onerous terms of service).

Thanks for using us! Let us know if you have any ideas on how to improve the site.

I do have a suggestion. Make it so that the amount shown as pledged to a website only includes paid pledges.

As it stands, a bunch of people could say, pledge $100/200/whatever each to a cause to make it seem like that cause has already raised a lot of money, causing people who might legitimately donate to go, "Hey, they've already raised loads. I'll give to someone else".

We've definitely debated this back and forth.

You can do this yourself on your site with: http://tipjoy.com/api/#extracting_transaction_data

You can use that feed to show, for example, only the recent paid transactions on your site.

Ooh. That'll be useful. I ended up having to make a new account for my latest donation drive, simply because on the last one, I'd taken in maybe.. $150 of paid pledges, but my 'amount' was near $400. :x

You can make the pledge drive centered around a blog post or twitter account. In the widgets set the targetUrl param, in addition to the user name param. The twitter tools are really useful too: http://tipjoy.com/twittertools

Yes, that's what I thought as well.

On the subject of tipjoy, a useful option would be to allow people to just collect recipients that they are interested in giving to, and then split $10 or whatever between them at the end of the month. I think this would have two advantages: reduce the effect of Clay Shirky's micropayment decision cost problem, and allow people to budget more easily (which will make them less scared of giving money).

(I was thinking of doing this until I heard of tipjoy, curse you :-).

I've used our bookmarklet which sets the price at $0.25 http://tipjoy.com/bookmarklet

You'll find even if you use it a lot (3 times daily?), you won't get that much over $10 or $20 a month.

But I do agree such a setup would be pretty cool. We're building out some other tools, but this is a good idea, if done right.

Another idea - I don't know how difficult this would be - would be to have some way for websites to give freebies to people who have tipped more than, say $5 in total to anyone that month. The website owners would get two benefits: people would be more likely to tip them, and they would get more traffic (because you would provide an 'if you liked this...' feature to sites who did that). This interacts well with the 'split $X at the end of the month' feature, because tippers would then round up in order to get the freebies.

The only issues I see here is that most tips are pretty decent. So a simple yes/no doesn't suffice. I'd like to see some sort of rating system (1-5). Unless they are relying on new content bubbling up and then being replaced by even newer tips ala HN.

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