Blogonomics: Tipjoy

Did you follow my link to Francisco Torralba's blog entry on mortgage securitization in Spain? If you did, and if you read his entry all the way to the end, you might have seen a little button there:

Clicking that button gives a 10-cent tip to Francisco, through a new service called Tipjoy. It's a really cool little service, because it's very easy: one click, no stress. If you've never tipped anybody before, you enter your email address so that you can activate your tipjoy account later. Once you've done that, you tip happily away, as does the total amount that you've tipped. Eventually, you pay all your tips in one lump sum of $5 or so; those tips can then be used by the bloggers you've tipped, to either be donated to charity or put towards an Amazon gift card. (Tipjoy is too young and small to be licensed as a money transfer service, so it can't - yet - pay cash.)

Aaron Schiff loves the idea, and is going to adopt it himself:

It's very simple, and you can tip on credit. I couldn't have done it better myself. The only restriction is that you have to give your earnings to charity, or use them to buy stuff from Amazon. That's fine, I like books.

I like it too, anything which makes tipping bloggers easier is a good idea in my book. The big difference between this and a PayPal tip jar of the type seen at Calculated Risk is that Tipjoy is vastly simpler: just one click, of a small set amount, which doesn't entail leaving the site or filling out forms or thinking hard about how much to tip.

Tipjoy even allows you to tip bloggers without a Tipjoy button, although I wouldn't recommend it at the beginning. I'm hoping it'll take off, and that soon Tipjoy buttons will work in RSS feeds too. Then I'll get tipping!