Over on our sister PaymentsViews.com blog, Glenbrook's Russ Jones takes a look at "Pay with a Tweet" - the name of a new payment concept developed by an interactive advertising agency called Innovative Thunder.

A seller registers a URL with Pay with a Tweet that points to some digital content they want to sell, and attaches a tweet to the URL. When a potential buyer comes along, they just click on the “Pay with a Tweet” button which tweets the seller’s message from the buyer and then provides the buyer with access to the underlying digital goods.

Were you unable to attend today's Future of Money Conference in San Francisco? You can follow attendee tweets about the conference using hashtag #futureofmoney on Twitter.

Attendees at NACHA's PAYMENTS 2010 conference in Seattle are tweeting their comments using the hashtag #payments2010. Follow them on Twitter - including Glenbrook's Erin McCune!

NACHA has announced that Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey and Square chairman Jim McKelvey will be the keynote speakers at the opening general session of PAYMENTS, the annual conference of NACHA—The Electronic Payments Association. This session will take place at 9:15 a.m. Pacific on Monday, April 26, 2010, at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center in Seattle. READ MORE »

Are you active on Twitter? Did you know that you can follow us on Twitter too? Both PaymentsNews.com and PaymentsViews.com have Twitter feeds that you can follow to get real-time updates for our postings:

• PaymentsNews
• PaymentsViews

Follow us and get our updates as real-time tweets!

Are you looking for real-time updates when new items are posted on PaymentsNews.com and PaymentsViews.com? The best way to receive them is to follow our Twitter feeds for PaymentsNews.com and for PaymentsViews.com. Over 1,200 payments professionals are now following our two Twitter feeds - if you're an avid Twitter use, feel free to join them!

I had a little bit of fun this afternoon - wondering out loud (on Twitter) if American Express was active on Twitter. So, I tweeted the question!

Less than an hour later, I had my reply - from Rachel at American Express - who asked if there was anything she could do. Very cool!

What did we learn? The American Express Customer Care Twitter account is AskAmex!

Norway's central bank, Norges Bank, used Twitter yesterday to communicate its latest interest rate decision. "We believe we are the first in the world to use Twitter this way," Norges Bank spokeswoman Siv Meisingseth told Reuters. Follow Norges Bank on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/norgesbank

Here's a table of major US banks and what we know about their usage of Twitter. The table is sorted in descending amount based on the number of followers who are subscribed to a particular bank's Twitter feed. If you have updates, please post them as a comment below!

MasterCard this morning has launched a new Twitter feed this morning.

New research by Gartner finds that while social banking won't change the consumer banking model immediately, retail banks that understand social media, financial social networks and microfinance have a better chance of adapting their services. Those banks that don't "face the prospect of being sidelined in the emergence of the social-banking services model." READ MORE »

IMshopping has announced its beta launch of what it's calling "the first human-assisted shopping website and Twitter shopping service where knowledgeable shopping guides respond to product questions and provide personalized recommendations for users. It’s like a Shopping 411 information service. The site offers the experience of going into a store, speaking with a knowledgeable expert and being guided to the best products for your needs." READ MORE »

Glenbrook's Scott Loftesness and Erin McCune are teaching a workshop on Web 2.0 and Financial Services this coming Thursday, March 19th.

In preparation, we'd like to gauge the level of social media and Web 2.0 participation in the Glenbrook community. There are only two questions and it won't take more than 2 minutes of your time (if that). Click here to take Glenbrook's Web 2.0 Survey

We'll share the results over on PaymentsViews.com later this week. Thank you!

Litle & Co's John Stevens is continuing his superb Twitter coverage today of the Merchant Risk Council's annual conference being held in Las Vegas. To, tune in, click here. Or try this Twitter search for MRC. Wow, John, rock on! Great job!

eBay is holding its 2009 Analyst Day today. In addition to webcasting the event, eBay is also tweeting highlights from the presentations using Twitter @ebayinkblog. You can follow the hashtag #ebayinc for comments from others as well.

This week the Prepaid Expo is being held in Orlando. If you're into Twitter, you can following along with some of the news by following @prepaidexpo - among others. They'll be using the hashtag #prepaid for their tweets from the show. If you're at the Expo and also tweeting away, tell us your Twitter ID in a comment to this post!

Join us for the Web 2.0 & Financial Services Workshop we're holding on March 19th in Santa Clara, California.

The demographic reach of Web 2.0 may surprise you – it's not just kids! Consumer buying decisions and the perception of major brands are being driven by social media's influence.

After a number of tentative forays, financial institutions are starting to use the tools and techniques of Web 2.0 more confidently. But is it too late? A number of personal finance management success stories (Mint, Wesabe, Quicken Online and a host of popular bloggers) have already gained traction - has their early success been at the expense of financial institutions?

You've got questions and in this workshop we'll provide some answers. Join us as we explore the world of Web 2.0 technologies and their impact on financial services in this one day workshop (morning plus optional afternoon sessions) on March 19th in Santa Clara. Registration is now open.

TwitPay, the Twitter-based person-to-person payments service, has announced that it's exiting its beta phase and will be moving "real money" starting today using Amazon Payments.

Working with Amazon Payments, we’ve built a new version of Twitpay that means we don’t have to be the middle-man for your cash. That’s good for you as a user because you don’t have to trust us with your money, you just have to trust Amazon. It’s good for us as a service because it allows us to focus on adding new features and focus on the core of our business."

Almost 300 folks are now following Payments News on Twitter since we began posting in real-time to Twitter last May. If you're active on Twitter and would like notification in your Twitter feed when we post a new item to Payments News, it's easy to subscribe to the Payments News Twitter feed!

Since we started on Twitter, about 1,500 "tweets" have gone out in real-time as we've posted new stories here on Payments News. Read on if you'd like to learn more - on the other hand, if you prefer receiving only a daily email update from Payments News, Twitter's not for you! READ MORE »

It's almost the end of 2008 ("good riddens" comes to my mind!) - and we've been exploring a bit. Steve Rubel had a great blog post this morning about using Google's Insights for Search feature to read the "tea leaves" about trends in 2009. He calls it "the closest thing we have to a global time capsule."

One interesting result I found was looking at how PayPal has trended over the last four years - with over twice as much interest demonstrated in PayPal today vs. four years ago.

Another interesting result in the PayPal summary is the strong interest in the UK vs. the US, France and other markets around the world. The top PayPal search term is "PayPal UK" - wonder why that is?

Here's one for Twitter - showing how interest in Twitter has grown like a weed during 2008.

Using the Google Insights for Search tool, you can search for and compare multiple terms - for example, here's PayPal vs. MasterCard - showing search interest in MasterCard remaining flat while PayPal's grew steadily. Curiously, if you look at the top searches related to MasterCard, the top result is "mastercard visa".

Give Google Insights for Search a try using your favorite payments-related phrase. If you find more interesting results, please share them in the comments here!

We recently began making available the Payments News newsfeed on Twitter - more information here. Yesterday, Discover Card began following our feed - and we became aware of theirs as well. To follow, go to: http://twitter.com/discovercard and, if you're a Twitter member, you can click Follow to follow their feed. From the DiscoverCard tagline: "We are here to listen, help people spend smarter, manage debt better and save more so they can achieve a brighter financial future."

Does your financial services company also have a Twitter feed? If so, send us Feedback (link in menu bar above) and we'll announce it here as well. Better yet, just signup to follow PaymentsNews on Twitter! Are you a merchant? See what Amazon.com is doing with its AmazonDeals Twitter feed. So you can easily find them, we'll tag all posts here related to Twitter with the Twitter tag. READ MORE »

This particular post is mostly for the Web 2.0 payments geeks among us.

Some of you have noticed that a couple of months ago we started posting our updates to Payments News not just to this site - but also as brief snippet updates send out via Twitter. Twitter became a new way you could follow the news here - we think that, if you're an active Twitter user, you'll naturally want to sign up to follow PN there. A couple of hundred folks have already done so.

Up until we added our Twitter feed, you could tune into Payments News by just periodically checking the web site, by subscribing to our daily email distribution (if you only want a dose of PN once a day every morning - but then you're also always going to be at least a day behind!) or by monitoring the PN RSS feed in semi-real time using an RSS reader (by the way, we LOVE and highly recommend Google Reader for reading RSS feeds!).

Now, if you choose to follow PaymentsNews on Twitter, you'll see our posts almost as soon as they're published - as we're using Twitterfeed to pull our RSS feed into Twitter automatically - and push them out to your Twitter account. So, if you're already on Twitter, be sure to follow PaymentsNews. If you're new to Twitter and want to try it, you can sign up here.

If you're looking for some advice as to how all this works, take a look at Wednesday's Wall St. Journal Mossberg Solutions column titled "Birds of a Feather Twitter Together" by Katherine Boehret. Or, read Tim O'Reilly's post "Why I Love Twitter". For more tips on using Twitter, see Darren Rowse's new TwiTip blog. Or, read Guy Kawasaki's "How I Use Twitter as a Twool". Twitter is going mainstream - fast.

And, if you want to follow your Payments News editor's personal Twitter feed, you can do so by following SJL My personal tweets are much more about what I'm working on, exploring, learning, questioning, etc. and definitely not about news of the day!

Questions/comments? Click on the Feedback tab in the title bar up top on this page and send us an email! If you're active on Twitter and want us to share your feed with others here on PN (like the other payments and banking blogs we share), send us your Twitter ID and we'll add you to a new page we'll be building soon of like-minded, Twitter-oriented payments professionals!

And, if you're looking for help thinking through the implications of all this Twitter stuff for your business, we can help you with that as well. READ MORE »

On Web Worker Daily, Mike Gunderloy takes a look at Twitpay, described as "a simple way to send payments via Twitter." A Twitpay account is funded via PayPal in amounts between $10 and $49.99. Twitpay's FAQ page says that the service was created by a team at the Atlanta Startup Weekend.

When I was in London a few weeks ago for the Digital Money Forum, I got introduced to Twitter, an addictive social networking service that allows you and your friends to follow each others latest thoughts. At the recent Finovate Startup conference in San Francisco, several of us in the audience (and around the globe!) were twittering back and forth about the presenters in real-time.

Anyway, the new Business Week has an article titled Why Twitter Matters. You can follow Payments News on Twitter (and get real-time updates about posts and my random thoughts). You can also use TweetScan to search for recent "tweets" about specific subjects - for example, here's a Tweetscan of every tweet mentioning PayPal. TweetScan even lets you setup an RSS feed of your favorite scans so you can monitor them in Google Reader, etc. Some big companies regularly monitor Twitter for mentions of their brands.

What's this got to do with payments, you ask? Nothing - but it's Friday and a pretty slow news day so far!

Glenbrook's Scott Loftesness will be attending tomorrow's FinovateStartup in San Francisco. Jim Bruene has pulled together an excellent program where forty financial services startups will "strut their stuff." Christophe Langlois from Visible Banking will be live blogging the event on Jim's NetBanker site. If you're also going to be there, let's get acquainted! We'll be blogging to Payments News as time permits and also commenting from @paymentsnews on Twitter.