Jonathan's Card

This reminds me of something that happened when I was just a bit younger... My girlfriend and I were graduating from pharmacy school and she was applying for residency positions (yes, they have those for pharmacists). Well, she found out she got the one she really wanted and so that night we went out to a nice dinner to celebrate. We did it up like you would expect a happy couple to - nice bottle of wine, share an appetizer and dessert, etc. We were still living on loans at the time and so in my head I was keeping track of about how much the meal was going to run me at the end of the night (for better or worse - keep in mind we were in college at the time). We had easily cleared a hundred bucks (quite the meal for college students who usually eat $7 sandwiches or more likely cook for themselves!), and when it was time for the bill, our waitress told us "The couple that was sitting over there paid for it."<p>!<p>You wanna talk about made our day? Try made our week. We had seen the older couple earlier, but we didn't know them, and they were gone by the time we got our bill. We couldn't even thank them, and we were just so... shocked. Since then, whenever we go out for a nice meal, I look for a young couple who looks happy and in love, just waiting to return that favor.<p>C.S. Lewis described altruism in one of his apologist books as a "good infection" - kindness that spreads uncontrollably. I can't do anything but agree.

Things like this are just apt for abuse. While in real life when this happens, we get a small connection with the person (they live near me / they also were getting coffee), on the internet, people only see a free gift card that automatically refills itself, and not the people that paid for it. When you are playing with other peoples money, it's hard to be frugal.

Whenever I go through a toll bridge, I frequently pay the toll of the person behind me. I've sometimes wondered if it propagates backward at all. For the Starbucks card, I would love to live in a society where this could work. Unfortunately it's one of those things where one anonymous bad egg will ruin (i.e., drain the account) for everyone else. Some way to restrict it to a community with less anonymity would help (i.e., go to a web site, auth through hacker news, and then you get the image -- then it is tied to your HN identity).

Hmm, I think posting the value of the card affects the data points. I understand why it needs to be done, but my thinking is that if nobody knows how much is on there it leaves it less prone to outright abuse.<p>If the card suddenly gets a $100 recharge I'm sure it will be abused a lot more. Maybe that's part of the experiment, but I'd like to see what people do in general without that knowledge.<p>EDIT: or maybe even just a "this card has more than &#60;insert cost of minimum item&#62;" so that people know it can be used, but not how many times.

@Socialize just loaded $100 on the card: <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/Socialize/status/100347389134643200" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/Socialize/status/100347389134643200</a><p>Here's the conf: <a href="http://drod.io/2R3o0I2a3R3n3S2L1J2N" rel="nofollow">http://drod.io/2R3o0I2a3R3n3S2L1J2N</a>

I used to work at Chick-fil=A before I started working for a startup and we would get people that would start paying for the people behind them in the drive thru and the next car would pull up and we'd say: Hey you had a...(whatever they had)..and the car behind you has already taken care of it. They would look shocked, smile, and say well we will get the car behind us. And this would go on for 10 or more cars.<p>It was really awesome. We also had people come through and ask for food for a homeless guy that sits on the off ramp on our interstate exit, and Chick-fil-A would give them food to take to the homeless guy and I'm sure many more situations occur all across the country that make peoples lives better. I think there is a thread of hope in humanity.

Potentially abusive use shown in these tweets.<p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/100347499188977665" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10034749918897766...</a><p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/100346742842728448" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10034674284272844...</a><p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/100341959557775360" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10034195955777536...</a><p>Edit: Any ideas?<p>Edit: It just happened again...<p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/100356049755844608" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10035604975584460...</a><p>Edit: More...<p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/100362860525395968" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10036286052539596...</a><p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/100364864173776897" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10036486417377689...</a><p><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/100365362465476608" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10036536246547660...</a>

I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here and kind of not: How can you justify spending $n to buy coffee for someone with a smartphone instead of donating $n to someone with fewer resources and greater needs?

$5,000 for @jonathanscard ... why not! <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/Socialize/status/100375061587951616" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/Socialize/status/100375061587951616</a>

Although the bit about paying it forward and social sharing is a great idea on its own, I think I'm a tad more excited that he actually made an API for this. That's seriously awesome.

&#62; Plus, it’s actually kinda fun to see those rewards stars drop into my in-app coffee cup.<p>Well, Jonathan may get the Rewards so it is not completely altruistic.<p>A real-time map of where transactions have been made ala <a href="http://twittervision.com" rel="nofollow">http://twittervision.com</a> might be interesting if this card goes viral<p><a href="https://www.starbucks.com/card/rewards" rel="nofollow">https://www.starbucks.com/card/rewards</a>

I know it is a fictional movie but if you haven't seen it, "Pay it Forward" is a movie that might make you briefly think about your impact.

There's a cafe under the castle in Prague where for a decade or more, patrons can buy an extra coffee for someone else. A physical cup goes up on a line above the counter. Others, usually students, will come in, see the cups, and ask for the free coffee. A Czech architecture student told me she never paid for a coffee -- just took one from those donated. When I would visit the cafe, I would make sure to add another cup or two to the line.<p>Jonathan's Card didn't seems to work, and it makes me think (unsurprisingly) that what works at local levels as this cafe in Prague, can't work in the Extremistan that is the entire global community.<p>We're so used to all the benefits of this new, suddenly-made-close world: play poker with a guy in Singapore one moment, buy an antique off an old woman in Portugal the next, without moving anything but the mouse; that we forget the beauty and function that the local still provides.

This reminds me of the drive-through "pay-it-forward" chains that spontaneously appear from time to time:<p><a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004084452_webstarbucks20m.html?syndication=rss" rel="nofollow">http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004084452_w...</a>

Such a simple and wonderful idea; it brightened my Sunday. (Edit: I wonder how soon it will take SBX to decide that this is a vulnerability in their mobile app and change something that will break this.)

Standing in line waiting for my drink. Cool experiment. Going to put the cash back when I get home.

The twitter feed updates once per minute, so if the $100 is spent by a bunch of people w/in that period of time, it will just show -$100. Should be checkable by Jonathan?

"Jonathan's Card is an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones."<p>What, exactly, is the hypothesis? While this _seems_ cool, I really don't understand what he's setting out to prove, that we don't already know: This will work until the number of people who abuse it grows to a certain point, after which everyone will loose faith, and nobody will contribute more funds.<p>[Ha. I just noticed the posts describing how this is being hacked.]

This is a really cool experiment. Coffee seems like the perfect use case since it's awkward to exploit, in that you're not going to buy $100 worth of coffee, just because the card has $100 on it. But what about other physical goods, like Barnes &#38; Nobles, HEB, Home Depot?

Here is a heat map of the location of @ mentions for @jonathanscard, which for the most part is the location of those that have added funds to the card.<p><a href="http://www.myheatmap.com/maps/b2Pqu0EGSgs=" rel="nofollow">http://www.myheatmap.com/maps/b2Pqu0EGSgs=</a>

It would be really fun to combine this kind of point of sale reward with games or puzzles or tasks, sort of like mechanical Turk combined with OKCupid or wufoo.<p>Cash prizes are less interesting for this kind of thing. (various studies)

I tried to load it, but all I got was: "This recipient does not accept payments from non-U.S. PayPal accounts." (I'm Swiss) Why would Starbucks restrict from where they get their money?

The balance just went from $0 to $40 - awful nice of whoever did it. I'm a big fan of this idea - put in $5 and you can help out someone who you've probably never met!

I don't really like how this is playing out, seems every time the card gets a decent amount of funds it gets takes in 1 lump sum. As people have said I think the buy a gift card thing ruins it, socially I don't think people would run up $100 purchase in one go unless they aren't buying coffee/ food.<p>If people donating to it's money is all going to a couple of people working the system for their own gain it doesn't really motivate people to give to it.

At this point it's clear that the card can be abused as there are people who for some reason think it's cool to suck the balance completely dry.<p>However, a company like Starbucks could set something up that is very similar to Jonathan's experiment but with a reduced abuse potential: just introduce a card with a limit per transaction. For example, if you could only charge 6 USD per purchase to the card, it would make life difficult for the cheaters.

This is a great experiment. I just added some money to the card. I wonder to prevent abuse, if perhaps you should use two cards , one for people to give to (A) and the other to use at starbucks (B). You can transfer from (A) to (B), when the balance of (B) goes below a certain amount say $15 so that one person can't abuse the card by taking away all the existing balance.

I put in $11. Part of it was to download my iOS app Canon Lens Buddy (<a href="http://bit.ly/pe2KFS" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/pe2KFS</a>) as part of Advertising/social experiment.<p>The credits lasted 10 minutes before used up. Should be interesting to see if this results in any downloads.<p>Proof of top up: <a href="http://twitpic.com/62shre" rel="nofollow">http://twitpic.com/62shre</a>

Interesting experiment in that the image is public with no signup/restriction to get at it. You would need to have a continuous stream of new "pay-it-forward" users to add money on the card, no? There are lots of coffee drinkers in the world... Wasn't there something in the news not too long ago about an investment firm that ran this way? :)

It would be cool if you could see who paid for your coffee and also who had spent the money, and let them communicate.

Reminds me of cafe in Japan where you order for person who comes after you and you eat what was ordered by person before you <a href="http://www.cabel.name/2009/09/kashiwa-mystery-cafe.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cabel.name/2009/09/kashiwa-mystery-cafe.html</a>

I've created a Haskell implementation of his API: <a href="http://rawr.mschade.me/jonathanscard/" rel="nofollow">http://rawr.mschade.me/jonathanscard/</a><p>The page on Rawr includes a basic usage example as well as links to my implementation on GitHub and Hackage.

OK I just tried a test: @Socialize put $49 on the card -- let's see if a smaller amount still tips off the hacker: <a href="http://drod.io/2E071F3T0C0V0G1w0f39" rel="nofollow">http://drod.io/2E071F3T0C0V0G1w0f39</a>

I agree, photos, names, or some proof of humanity of the people behind the karma would help to stem abuse. The internet almost makes this abuse of karma easier due to the anonymity. You just don't feel as bad.

I contributed in order to get people telling my wife (<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/raintea" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/raintea</a>) Happy Birthday tomorrow (8/8).<p>Thought I'd cross-post here for the cause too :)

just made a basic visualization of the data on the balances endpoint. <a href="http://aoberoi.me/jonathans-card/" rel="nofollow">http://aoberoi.me/jonathans-card/</a><p>I'm thinking about what types of interesting questions we can answer by visualizing the data. If anyone wants to contribute to that effort, fork me on github (<a href="https://github.com/aoberoi/jonathans-card" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aoberoi/jonathans-card</a>) and send me a pull request, i'll update the site.

As somebody else mentioned, it's unfortunate that one bad person could ruin it for everybody else.<p>Is it possible to restrict the card only to coffee (to prevent huge catering orders)?

There's no money on the card? <a href="http://jonathanstark.com/card/api/latest" rel="nofollow">http://jonathanstark.com/card/api/latest</a>

I hope Starbucks' system can handle the amount of activity this thing is eventually going to get! You're picking up a lot of steam.

awesome initiative! I always loved the pay it forward concept.<p>P.S. does anyone want to call this guy Lord Starkbucks?<p>Now I know where Jon Snow ends up.

this is completely amazing and a great proof of concept -- there is so much that could be built on top of this

I think it is wonderful that many are generously giving others free coffee.<p>But... how many of them really believe in karma?

Karma Behaviorism: Does It Pay Off? <a href="http://bit.ly/nMPtFV" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/nMPtFV</a>

And in case anyone was wondering the first balance he tweeted was:<p>jonathanscard<p>I got $7.91 left on me.<p>18 Jul

this is such a good thing and i hate to see this go to waste when some capitalist bastard starts selling coffees for half the price using the card.

It worked! Thanks for the iced Americano and pastry!

So, anybody set up the Auto-Reload yet ;-)?

interesting experiment, but all it takes is one troll to ruin the whole thing.

I love this idea.

You can check the balance here <a href="http://www.talkaboutdesign.com/starbucks/" rel="nofollow">http://www.talkaboutdesign.com/starbucks/</a>

US only?

And Starbucks shuts this down in 5... 4... 3... 2...

OK I'm going to go nuclear to determine if this is some automated script or a manual hack: @Socialize just put $300 (!!!) on the card (remember... this is to promote the SDK Speed Challenge... so maybe click the link so I can claim some kind of ROI! <a href="http://go.GetSocialize.com/SDK-Challenge" rel="nofollow">http://go.GetSocialize.com/SDK-Challenge</a>)<p>I figure if it's a script, the $300 will disappear instantly. But if it's manual, it's unlikely that someone could manually xfer that at a Starbucks counter w/o getting questioned.<p>Confirmations (max was $100 at a time):<p><a href="http://drod.io/0G391o170o1e1V0Y400H" rel="nofollow">http://drod.io/0G391o170o1e1V0Y400H</a> <a href="http://drod.io/1t362M3B1a0t421I1Q0b" rel="nofollow">http://drod.io/1t362M3B1a0t421I1Q0b</a> <a href="http://drod.io/2O1R052m0g0q1g1P1x1V" rel="nofollow">http://drod.io/2O1R052m0g0q1g1P1x1V</a>