Within hours of launching, a Twitter in-stream payments service from start-up Ribbon has been killed off by the micro-blogging site.
The Ribbon integration with Twitter Cards let merchants create customised links for products which they could then tweet. When potential buyers clicked on the tweet, they were offered the option to enter their payment details to buy the product without having to leave Twitter.
Ribbon already offers a similar service for Facebook and this week introduced it to YouTube as well as Twitter. But the latter killed off the option within 90 minutes, meaning that, although sellers can still add a Ribbon link to tweets, buyers are redirected to a new Web page to complete the purchase.
In a blog post, Ribbon CEO Hany Rashwan says: "Before we released this, we made sure to validate our Twitter Card implementation...and all lights were green. We've had discussions with Twitter in the past, and are eager to find a way to work together."