Ask HN: Please review Twollars | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review Twollars

21 pointseisokant11 comments

Dear HN Members,

I've been here on HN for almost a year now and time and time again I see the most valuable comments come by on Ask HN Review posts. To be honest, they are by far my favorites.

I am very happy to now be posting my own. Last month my co-founder and I launched Twollars. Twollars is a Twitter thank you currency. Simply by tweeting "Give 5 Twollars @username" - there is no registration - you can send Twollars to someone. (You can also use any of the other commands - here is a list on our Wiki with all the commands we are experimenting with: http://thinktank.twollars.com/wiki/71163)

Where we hope to do a lot of good is by allowing people to donate their Twollars to a charity. The charity in turn is sponsored by a company who pledges to donate the real amount in hard currency.

We are also very close to launching multi-currencies. Which will allow anyone on Twitter to start their own currency. The thoughts behind this are to allow people to setup their own community currency (similar to many open money concepts that are being tried).

URL: http://Twollars.com

Any feedback is really appreciated!

Thank you so much,

Eiso & Mac

Eiso,

Twollars is a cool idea. How do you bridge the thing? Real money vs Twollar money. I mean, do you actually donate money when someone donates money? or is it just a service where you allow others collect donations?

P.S: I've been noticing you've been using using Twollars a lot yourself. Did you launch it from a cafe? I think I saw a pic of you in a green shirt and a laptop :) I've been spying on Twollars for a while LOL :)

Hey Akash,

The way it works is that companies who are interested in donation money to a charity and getting visibility on Twitter can chose to sponsor a charity. So then if for example a 1000 Twollars are donated, the company sponsoring the charity will donate a $1000 Dollars.

Yup, I had launched it from a netbook in a hotel lobby/restaurant in London since I was traveling at the time and we really wanted to get it out there (someone posted a Twitpic of that). It was a great experience and got to meet up with some great people via Twitter. One guy even found a problem in the code and averted disaster.

All the best,

Eiso

yup! that's a really good idea.

It makes donation collection easier. So that makes you like "TipJoy for offline world" coz you'll not be dealing with real currency and only manage donations.

I can guess whats up next: an sms version, iphone app, android and so on.

Rock-n-rolla!!

All the best Eiso

OK, so the actual transaction here, isn't Twitter users donating to the charity, it's Twitter users donating publicity to a company which is donating to charity - correct?

Cool - I recently thought about the same thing, when I wondered what happened to "kudos". Hope it works out for you - the idea with the charities is great!

Eiso mentioned you but I never made the connection. It's a great idea! I work with a few charities who are looking to leverage social media to help them through these tough times. I need to talk with one of you about this more. BTW I know I don't comment here often, but I read you posts regularly and share your link's as well. Congrats, I have a feeling this is going to take off.

Sounds great! Just drop me a mail at eiso@twollars.com

I will in a couple of days. I would love to be able to mention it at their next meeting. I'll fill you in with all the details! BTW, I love this blog

whats stopping the Charity-Water to make a fake twitter account and do Give 1000000 Twollars @username.

Also, you need to give an incentive for the businesses to use this, instead of sending the $$$ directly. For that you'll need to build up your core group of users, and then tweet stuff like "IBM has donated $15,000USD to _____ Charity thanks to your efforts"

Every Twitter account has a starting balance of 50 Twollars. So if you would tweet that - you would get a message saying you don't have sufficient balance.

The incentive for the businesses is exactly what you're mentioning - the visibility on Twitter.

You're using the @ symbol incorrectly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com