MAKE | The Starbucks card with an API – an experiment in social sharing

Jonathan Stark, author of Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, has not only posted his Starbucks card for all to see, but he’s using it to conduct an interesting experiment in social sharing:

Hi! I’m Jonathan Stark. You can download this picture of my Starbucks card to your phone and buy coffee at Starbucks with it. Seriously. My card gets charged, you don’t. Details are here.

If you’re feeling generous, you can also add money to my Starbucks card by doing this and enjoy some serious good karma.

Jonathan’s Card is an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones. I stumbled on the idea while doing research for a blog post about Broadcasting Mobile Currency.

Not only that, but he’s created an API for the card:

At least two fellow geeks built graphing apps on top of the @jonathanscard Twitter stream within the first couple of days. Rather than break apps every time I change the Twitter message format, I whipped up a simple read-only API that returns JSON.

Give a coffee, get a coffee – Jonathan’s Card
Developer API

7 Responses to The Starbucks card with an API – an experiment in social sharing

thecolor on August 6th, 2011 at 10:16 pm said:

if you continue to use his card (sharing with others or not)… he’ll get a nifty free drink card mailed to him quite often. :D Starbucks may not be happy with that… whether they are getting money from the card or not. :| Cool social fun though.

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thecolor on August 6th, 2011 at 10:16 pm said:

if you continue to use his card (sharing with others or not)… he’ll get a nifty free drink card mailed to him quite often. :D Starbucks may not be happy with that… whether they are getting money from the card or not. :| Cool social fun though.

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jerseymall on August 7th, 2011 at 2:14 am said:

http://tinyurl.com/4skyaqr

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Cheap Subscriptions on August 7th, 2011 at 11:15 am said:

Really interesting idea. I’d like to see whether people actually add money to his card, and how often it’s used.

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- Kevin Griffin on August 8th, 2011 at 3:05 pm said:
  
  It’s been going for a while now – and a lot of people have used it/added to it.
  
  jonathanscardFYI – $1246.65 have gone through me today. Wow.8/7/11 9:56 PM
  
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Andy Matthews on August 8th, 2011 at 3:07 pm said:

Hey Cheap Subscriptions: people are indeed adding money to the card. There’s been several times where people have added $100 or more. I’m one of the geeks he mentions and you can track the current value of the card on my website:
http://andymatthews.net/code/starbucks/card.cfm,

Hey TheColor,
he does get a free drink mailed to him, but only one. According to the Starbucks rewards program you get a free bday drink after 5 stars. Since Jonathan goes to Starbucks daily I’m sure he’s had 5 stars for a long while now.

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Mirrorless Lenses App on August 8th, 2011 at 6:46 pm said:

I thought it was a pretty cool experiment. It’s prevented from getting out of hand as you can’t have a negative balance but I have seen some big withdrawals which could easily be shop owners taking out large payments of $100.

I put in $11 yesterday. Proof! http://twitpic.com/62shre

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