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Jenna Wortham at NYT on Twitpay (via CNet) –

Twitpay is a start-up that aims to allow people to send small payments through Twitter. To do this they include the recipients’ username in their message. For example, posting the update “@johnsmith twitpay $10 for lunch” would deliver the cash to that Twitterer’s Twitpay account. The company monitors the public stream of messages for the keyword “twitpay” and facilitates the exchange. You replenish your Twitpay account using a site like PayPal. Once recipients have accumulated more than $10 in their accounts, the balance can be cashed out in the form of an Amazon gift card. For all transfers exceeding $1, Twitpay will take a flat cut of 5 cents.

I was earlier dismissive of suggestions that Twitter may be used as a micropayment platform, but with third-party applications like StockTwits and TwitPay that deal with real money, the Twitter ecosystem is quickly maturing, and I won’t be surprised if these apps start making money before Twitter does.

Update 1 (from comments): There are issues around privacy (which can probably be solved by DM), there are issues around search (why trust an unknown company with your money), there are issues around ease of use (the payer needs to put money in the account prior to the transaction, the receiver doesn’t get cash) and business model (Twitter may want a part of the revenue at some point), but it’s an interesting start.

Yesterday, I wrote about Dell making $1 million in sales through Twitter. Today, StockTwits, a two month old service that tracks tweets about the stock market, secured a $800,000 first round of funding from a super-connected group of its power users (via VentureBeat).

The service collates a list of influential Twitter users who tweet about the stock market and highlights their stock market related tweets. It also allows you to track tweets related to a specific stock or your own portfolio of stock. It even shows a nice mashup view of stock price movements and Twitter reactions to it.

StockTwits only has 5,000 registered users and 250,00 pageviews per month, but it’s a good indicator of how third party applications will mine and mashup the Twitterstream to create focused communities that may be easier to monetize than Twitter itself.

Here’s a video that gives a quick tour of the key StockTwit features –

What is OpenSocial?

TechCrunch revealed today that, instead of launching a new social networking platform, Google will launch OpenSocial, a set of three common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any hosts, social networks, that choose to participate. These APIs give developers access to the data needed to build social applications: access to a user’s profile, their friends, and the ability to let their friends know that activities have taken place. The initial lineup of hosts, or participating social networks, include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle (update: MySpace, Bebo and SixApart have also joined OpenSocial). The initial lineup of developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

You can also see a press release on the subject posted on John Battelle’s Searchblog.

What is my overall impression of OpenSocial?

In my opinion, Google gets three on three for not calling it Maka-Maka, for not falling into the Orkut vs. Facebook trap -

While a lot of bloggers are looking at ‘Maka-Maka’ in a Orkut vs. Facebook context, I think Google will be short-selling itself if it looked at the opportunity in such a limited way.