Archive for March, 2012

Buy your friend a beer with Tweet-a-Beer

Author: Jason Harris
March 5, 2012

There are two loves I have in life – craft beer and my friends. Also, since many of my friends also happen to be on Twitter, we arrange to have beers via the social networking service.  Well now, I can not only arrange to meet them for beer, but buy them their favorite pint all with my phone and a Tweet.

Tweet-a-Beer is an online service that connects your Twitter account and your Paypal account in order to make a mobile payment solution for buying your friends, buddies and acquaintances.

The Tweet-a-Beer service uses Chirpify as the conduit between Twitter and Paypal and makes the service easy for you and your buddies. For those unaware, Chirpify is an online service that users can register their Twitter and Paypal accounts to enable them to make payments via tweets. In essence, Chirpify  is a Twiter commerce platform

To use Tweet-a-Beer, you go to the site and say who you want to share a beer with and where you want to do so. The Tweet-a-beer sends $5 from your Paypal account to your buddies’ Paypal account.

Here’s the actual flow, as described by the Tweet-a-Beer website:

Follow the steps to authenticate your Twitter account with Tweet-a-Beer and Chirpify. Then “pre-approve” Chirpify to send PayPal payments on your behalf. After this you can use the app to choose the @recipient (on Twitter), send them a beer ($5), and add a reason, meeting place, or requests for the juke box. Once submitted, the recipient will receive a tweet mention from you with a link leading them to details on how to claim the beer money.

This awesome web service was brewed up tenfour and Waggener Edstrom, both Portland companies, which are an amazing creative agency and amazing PR agency, respectively.

Using the web app

One facet to Tweet-a-Beer that I really enjoy is that the service is a really amazing mobile web experience. Rather than releasing an iPhone or Android application, tenfour decided conduct the functionality in a mobile web app experience. As I use Windows Phone, Meego and a mix of Mobile OSs, I’m glad I can Tweet-a-Beer no matter what device I’m using.

Kudos to the Tweet-a-Beer team for going mobile web!