TwellWishes Brings Virtual Goods to Twitter

TwellWishes is a brand new web app that “allows you to send well wishes to your friends on Twitter for occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, or whatever you’d like!” Twitter doesn’t really provide a method to learn details about the people who follow you. Standard procedure is to simply follow them and monitor their tweets, but by the time you notice it’s their birthday, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. TwellWishes hopes to change that by giving you a heads up about upcoming events and provides a virtual marketplace for exchanging gifts.

Tiffani Bell

TwellWishes is brought to us by Yahya E. B. Henry (@YahyaHenry, entrepreneur and fellow GA resident) and Tiffani Bell (@tiffani, geek and Ruby on Rails developer, you might remember her from her guest posts written here and her Peeps of the Web interview). Great to see a young black-owned web application stepping into new territory. Besides simply allowing you to keep up with events related to your followers, which is pretty cool, it’s the virtual gifts that are most intriguing.

For many of us, virtual gifts seems kinda silly. You’re buying something for someone that they can never touch, it’s completely intangible. For the most part, virtual gifts don’t even do anything. They just sit there on your profile for the world to see. So why are users on sites like Facebook buying tens of millions of dollars worth of virtual swag?

As we start living more and more of our lives online, I guess it seems logical that many things we do in the real world may find a way to translate, whether it makes sense at first or not. It’s easiest to see how these virtual gifts work when you think of intangible goods like music or movies. Seems logical to give someone a music download or pay for them to watch a movie online.

It seems that the same concept of giving, even when the end user isn’t really receiving something they can use, is still enough to get the cash flowing. These virtual gifts carry significance in establishing identity, serving as status symbols, sending romantic signals, and otherwise building relationships. Everyone knows how much a particular gift costs, so owning something expensive in the virtual space is just the same as owning it the real world.

TwellWishes seems like a simple, but fun idea and I wish them success.  This business model has already proved to be successful on other platforms and the chances of it exploding on Twitter high.  Jumping into the virtual gifts market may allow Twitter users to get some bling, but it also goes to show that it’s not really the thought that counts.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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