http://tipjoy.com/APIcontest/ for those that don't want to read through the techcrunch article

I expect to see a few great submissions from the Hacker News community.

I really don't get this. It seems like the usages are a bit contrived- "$1 @someone for something". It would be easier to just give people a way to twitter their purchases once they make them.

We do that as well.

Very cool, but I don't see any way for clients to use oAuth. Requiring users to give me their Twitter passwords seems so last year.

This is a problem with OAuth. Tokens aren't transferable like passwords.

We're going to make a work-around, and it should be live within a week. http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/msg/...

From there:

No need to keep it a secret: we plan on allowing for a authorization_url param that is an OAuth signed call to http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.json

We'd verify the call with Twitter, then proceed like we have a twitter password.

This call won't work though, because we'd need to update the user's status http://tipjoy.com/api/#creating_twitter_payment

We'll enable a work-around by posting the tweet, and calling that endpoint with an id of a tweet already posted.

Great, I'll be on the lookout!