Bitcoin.com has announced the launch of its new Tweet boosting service called “Birds” enabling Twitter users to earn bitcoin for simply retweeting. 
Birds: Marketing Tweets with Bitcoin
The new service is a Twitter application tied to bitcoin payments, which is intended to help people market messages by attracting other people with profit opportunities.
When you send out a tweet with the intention of having as many people as possible see it, you send some bitcoin along with it. People who retweet your post will receive some of the coin. That way, people get paid to spread your message.
The platform provides a win-win situation to the people participating because it’s easy money for people who retweet these messages, and relatively cheap marketing for those who are sending them out.
Birds.bitcoin.com is a clone of a previous service that was originally built by Erik Voorhees and Ira Miller called FeedZeBirds. Like Bitcoin.com’s “Birds” service, FeedZeBirds was an advertising platform designed for Twitter and it automatically paid out bitcoins for retweeting or sponsoring messages.
The service was very popular, but unfortunately, it was shut down after a long period of inactivity, during which campaigns stopped receiving funding and customer support tickets were left unaddressed.
Voorhees and Miller addressed complaints on BitcoinTalk during their inactive period, apologizing for delays and saying that they simply did not have enough time to address issues arising at FeedZeBirds.
Bitcoin investor Roger Ver was a big fan of Feed Ze Birds and was interested in reintroducing it on Bitcoin.com, an interest he first made known on the site’s own forums. Ver stated that the service “Worked amazingly well to spread ideas, and to get Bitcoins into the hands of new people.”
Birds was built and written by Bitcoin.com’s CTO, Emil Oldenburg, who had this to say about the new service:
[…] We had to rewrite everything from scratch. The old service was a Drupal plugin. It was written for a very old version of Drupal, had SQL injections and was using Coinapult to send bitcoins. I decided to rewrite everything. The new version has more features and look and feel like Twitter. One cool thing about the service is that the backend is basically a SPV wallet that uses multisig. We don’t rely on any third party blockchain services.
The platform is a fairly straightforward concept with a simple user-interface that makes it easy for anyone to use. You compose a tweet, then pay out bitcoin to a specified address, and from there the tweet will be sent out.
After that, others will be able to see and retweet it for a bitcoin reward that is based on the amount of followers those people have. Additionally, Birds will have a feature called “Bullhorn,” which instead of retweeting, will allow people to simply post the content of the original message — making it seem like multiple people are talking about the same thing.
Make Bitcoin Easier
Birds will allow people without any bitcoin to find a very easy way of earning it, while learning about it at the same time. All transactions are instant and on-chain, and people who want to spread messages will find this service very easy to use.
This insight shouldn’t be ignored as there are some barriers to Bitcoin adoption that limits newbies from entering the market — one of them being the lack of ways to easily obtain bitcoins in the first place.
This application provides an easy way for people to earn bitcoin — in a way that is not easily done with traditional forms of currency. This is a promising prospect for increasing consumer adoption.