The Rails Rumble took place this past weekend, and together with fellow raleigh.rb‘ers Mark Bennett and Nathaniel Talbott we formed a team. 48 hours, one go-cart race, and several Wii games later we finished our creation and dubbed it Link Tipping.
Link Tipping is very similar to digg, except instead of voting on links you “tipp” them with real money. We integrated with Amazon’s new Flexible Payment Service to support micropayments: you can tipp in $0.25 increments. Once a link has received a tipp, the individual who created the resource at that link can log in, “claim” the tipps, and have the money transferred to his Amazon account.
(No, I’m not misspelling “tip.” We intentionally spelled it “tipp” in the app.)
The wonderful thing about Link Tipping is that, since real money is being used, the links that move to the top of the list are much more likely to be useful and remarkable.
There were 90+ apps entered in the Rails Rumble and voting started yesterday. Check out the full list. Could these many apps have been built in this short an amount of time using a Java or .NET stack? I have my doubts. Rails isn’t a silver bullet, but it sure is fun to rumble with.