TweetDonate

The deadline is fast approaching! I completely forgot about this until a couple days ago. Law school has been keeping me busy.

I was considering making a video that would show traditional donations by filming the people downtown soliciting donations but I think most people are familiar with the usual way it’s done. Instead, my video is going to focus purely on the features and the product. I think the tech people judging will appreciate this more.

The problem with new ideas is that they’re sometimes not new. Since I’ve been developing tweetdonate.org I’ve come across some other things that seem like it. The idea isn’t particularly unique, but I think that there isn’t another service doing this. There’s possibly a site doing it and there’s a service that looked like they were planning on doing it but aren’t.

Just found a site called Twonate.com that sounds like they are maybe doing the same thing. Their website is down though so I can’t tell.

There is a service that on netsquared.org seems to advertise that they’re doing something that sounds like my service (http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/tweet4good-donate-and-fundraise-using-twitter) but the actual site is in Spanish and doesn’t seem to do what they said they were (going to be?) doing: http://www.tweet4good.org/. I was alarmed when I read their description but it doesn’t look like they’re actually doing what tweetdonate does.

Hey Reddit,

I’m writing this for PayPal’s programming competition that ends in a couple months. If you could leave any comments on Reddit that would be easier to manage, but you can also leave them here.

Thanks for checking it out.

Thanks,
Addy

The server should be picking up tweets within about 15 seconds, so give it a few seconds after you tweet a donation/confirmation. Hopefully if/when this becomes more popular I can up the speed a couple notches.

It’s sort of a pain to integrate my app with WordPress but after a few days of fixing things it seems to be working alright.

PayPal is holding a substantial programming competition for the second year in a row: https://www.x.com/community/ppx/devchallenge

I’m a law student at Queen’s University but I really enjoy programming, so in my spare time I develop websites for clients (summerhilldesign.com) and compete in programming competitions (Yahoo, TechCrunch so far). PayPal’s competition has enormous prizes and an interesting challenge.

I pay for everything online using credit card and pay through the merchant’s site (often using PayPal as a conduit and never using my PayPal account). I sat down and thought about how things could be any different and I realized there’s a lot of opportunity in donations. Donations are something that I think happen fairly quickly. People become inspired to donate and then they do. How can they do that easier and at the same time raise the profile of the group they’re donating to? Twitter offers the perfect opportunity for this.

This blog part of the site is very much a work in progress. I still haven’t ported all of the code in and it looks a bit odd…

The service works! There’s a lot to improve but I’ve got the basic thing working and the idea is sound.

I was going to create these pages manually but WordPress makes it so much easier to manage. Now I need to set up the custom pages that TweetDonate uses and the service will be back up.

It’s too bad the PayPal competition ends in September!