Beer-a-Friend with Tweet-a-Beer

For those times when you want to buy your friend a beer, but they are halfway around the world, there is now, an app for that — Tweet-a-Beer.

Tweet-a-Beer, created by Portland’s one tenfour and Waggener Edstrom, was introduced at the SXSW Interactive portion of the convention. It utilizes twitter’s Chirpify, twitter’s payment app, and sends payments via paypal. You can enter a personalized message to the beer-receiver of your choice, maybe describing how awesome they are and why the deserve this beer money, or you can enter in a time and place to meet to grab a few cold ones. Either way, once you hit that submit button, your friend will get a tweet telling them that they just received the $5.

Sure, maybe $5 isn’t enough in some parts of the world (like New York), but it’ll certainly help those who are in need of a dire drink. The $5 also doesn’t need to go to beer, but it’s certainly a lot more fun that way.

Tenfour isn’t really looking to make money off this idea, though they are skimming 10 cents for each transaction. Kent Hollenbeck states that the release of Tweet-a-Beer during the SXSW was no coincidence, “Given how large the conference is, the best way to track where the hottest spots are and where to meet up face-to-face is via Twitter and location-based services… it’s the perfect venue to help foster real-life connections.”

The app only took six weeks to create and already has about 500 users.

While the idea is great, there are still a lot of things that could be added to future updates of the apps, like being able to request a beer from readers (in the case of bloggers). There’s also the fact that for those that are friends IRL can just send $5 to their friend if they know their paypal address and not be charged a ten cent fee. Not to mention the chance people may not even notice that they were mentioned on a tweet or sent something through twitter, leaving the money on a beerless limbo!

Overall, the idea is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t seem to have a lot of staying power aside from a one time gimmicky use.