© 2010-2011 Digital Bazaar, Inc. Website CSS created by @andytlr and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License. All other website content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License
PaySwarm enables people that create digital content such as blog posts, music, film, episodic content, photos, virtual goods, and documents to distribute their creations through their website and receive payment directly from their fans and customers. If you have a passion for creating things on the Web, or would like to support people doing great things - PaySwarm is for you.
The platform is an open web standard that enables Web browsers and Web devices to perform Universal Web Payment. PaySwarm fixes the problems with rewarding people on the web - it reduces and nearly eliminates transactional friction. It ensures that the people that you want to support are automatically rewarded for their hard work.
This Web-native payment technology is designed to seamlessly integrate with how the Web works, not how the banks and the credit card companies work. The technology can be integrated directly into WordPress-based websites with support for Drupal and other content management systems in the works. It has a simple, well-defined API, like Twitter, that allows for universal payment on the web.
The way that we reward each other and pay for services on the Web is broken. There is a great amount of friction that is created between you and the people you want to reward on the Web. People that are doing amazing things, that are doing great work. Having to enter credit card information or login details is time consuming and monotonous. We should be able to spend a few pennies just as easily as we drop spare change on a table. We need to fix the way that we control and move our money around on the Web.
An open web platform is a combination of technology that is patent-free, royalty-free, published in a free specification, using well-defined protocols and other open technologies. The entire PaySwarm standard, like HTML, HTTP, and JavaScript, is an open web platform. Almost every successful Web technology is built and released in this way.
PaySwarm supports Micropayments. The term micropayment is used loosely, as we don't want to bother the customer to reach for their wallet every time they need to spend a couple of cents, or even a couple of dollars. Micropayment in this case, specifically refers to the ability to automatically distribute payments in increments of up to 1/100,000th of a cent to anybody listed in PaySwarm digital contracts.
Digital Bazaar, the company that created PaySwarm, has previously blogged about their demo. If you are curious to see what a website-based implementation of PaySwarm looks like, check out the PaySwarm Demo.
The following video explains why just supporting the people you want to support and making money on the web is so difficult. It outlines how PaySwarm can help build a better Web for all of us.
You can affect the future of PaySwarm by collaborating with the open community that is involved with designing and implementing this technology. There are no qualifications necessary to join the group - if you're interested in digital content distribution, peer-to-peer development, media, digital culture or the Web, join us. There are a few ways that you can keep up with what is going on as well as take part in designing the future of digital content distribution on the web:
You can use Twitter to follow the PaySwarm project leader (@manusporny) or follow general announcements (@payswarm). The hashtag for this project is #payswarm.
Much of the standardization work is done at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the Web Payments Community Group. There is an active mailing list where a good amount of technical discussion occurs. The group also holds weekly teleconferences with archived minutes and audio from each meeting. The PaySwarm community hangs out on Internet Relay Chat in the #payswarm channel on FreeNode. You can use a web browser to connect if you don't know how to use IRC.
The PaySwarm Developer Wiki is a good starting place for those that would like to learn about developing for the PaySwarm platform. The Web Payments GitHub Repository contains all of the source code to this website as well as reference implementations of PaySwarm.
The PaySwarm FAQ covers a list of frequently asked questions about the PaySwarm standardization work.
The PaySwarm Use Cases are the core scenarios that are the basis for the PaySwarm Web API and Payment and Transaction processing environment.
The PaySwarm Web API defines the open PaySwarm protocol for exchanging money via the Web.
© 2010-2011 Digital Bazaar, Inc. Website CSS created by @andytlr and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License. All other website content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License