Kurzinterview mit Flattr-Gründer: API kommt

Über das Kontakt-Formular habe ich die Flattr-Jungs angeschrieben und exakt 12 Minuten später war die Antwort von Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi da, Co-Gründer von Pirate Bay und Flattr. Wow!!!

Hier das Interview:
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Hi Robert!

We love the germans so here goes!

1.) You are still in the invite only beta. What do you think about your pace on the german market? Or it doesnt that matter to you since your focus is the US market?
We have been growing tremendously in Germany for some reasons. We think it’s because we’ve been to some conferences there to talk about Flattr (and other issues related) as well as the germans right now having a big focus on monetization of content and micropayments in general. We do not focus on ANY market (being european we rather focus on europe than US anyhow right now), but germany has become the biggest one for the moment. I love it myself, since I live in Berlin anyhow :-)

2.) There are many pessimits saying it wont work because the readers arent that interested like the content producers. What do you say about this?
We think that time will tell. Our concept might not be foolproof but we think it’s a good solution and that it might work. But it’s still a concept model and not a final solution. We need to try simply, and we hope it works.

3.) Whats next, what is coming up? Is there a thought about alternative ways to fill up your deposit than just via PayPal and Moneybookers?
Currently we’re building easier integration for application developers. It’s the big focus we have. It will be a REST API to begin with and OAuth support etc. It’s quite techie, but we need to finalize the tech issues before we take another step into the marketing factors…

We just added moneybookers since Paypal is not always so very nice to people. Also, Moneybookers has lots of local options for payment (like german banks etc) and we want to make it easier for people. In the end we’re looking for doing some of these things ourselves if we become big enough for it to actually make sense – banking transfers and so on.

4.) Do you fear that PayPal will develop something around social micro payment?
I don’t fear it really. Firstly, they are only interested in normal payments, rather than what we are doing. I think our system is more about social media than payments actually. It’s not something Paypal has a lot of experience with really. Also, if there’s competition that’s just good for users as well as us – we need to improve if there would be competition around you know!

5) What do you think is the biggest challenge for Flattr?
The biggest challenge right now is probably to make the platform easy enough for everybody to use. It’s very technical today and we want to change that… by opening up with our API we hope to reach out to developers to implement our system in their existing products and services!