Dwolla Offers "A Dollar for Your Thoughts"

Dwolla Offers "A Dollar for Your Thoughts"

The next time someone offers you a penny for your brilliant musings, feel free to turn them down.

Dwolla, a social-payments company based in Iowa, believes your ideas are worth at least a dollar and is willing to pay up. Their Twilio-powered site, www.dollarthoughts.com, is out to change the world—one dollar at time. Simply log in through Facebook or send an SMS to 515-650-4583.

Building Dollar Thoughts

The site was built by James Armstead and Ben Milne using Ruby On Rails, the Twilio API and the Dwolla API. They used a Twilio Gem as the Ruby wrapper for the Twilio REST API.

Armstead said Dwolla uses Twilio for all its SMS messaging and SMS notification needs.”Working with the Twilio APIs has been absolutely stupid simple,” he said.

Dwolla doesn’t censor the thoughts it pays for—though it is just a one dollar deal. People can post as many thoughts as they like, but they will only get paid for the first one.

The site relies on the community to vote thoughts up or down. In theory, the most insightful bubble to the top. On Thursday, someone from Des Moines was thinking about action superstar memes: “Chuck Norris has a website, it’s call the Internet,” while someone from San Francisco had just one word, “poo,” on the brain.

Dwolla’s Financial Transaction Solution

Founded in 2008, Dwolla provides a way to empower people to make and receive payments without having to fork over large fees to credit card processors. Dwolla charges only 25 cents for any transaction over $10—compared to other payments processors that typically charge up to 3 percent, depending on the size of the transaction. Transactions under $10 are free.

The site recently released a new product called “Instant” that lets users borrow up to $500. In effect, the Dwolla mobile app thus turns your phone into an ATM.

What do you think about that? Dwolla will happily pay a buck to find out.