Twitter to rule P2P payments?

I don't really get Twitter but maybe it's time to start paying attention because the microblogging site could soon be a major player in mobile person-to-person payments.

Earlier this week Nate Westheimer, Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Rose Tech Ventures, posted a blog claiming the site, which doesn't make any real money yet, could become a billion dollar company within a year if it embraces mobile money transfer.

He argues that Twitterers already use the type of machine language needed for mobile payments to work.

Says Westheimer: "If Twitter had a P2P payments system in place today, it would become the most used mobile payments system overnight. Having the ability to send a message like “p innonate $5″ for that beer I just bought you would integrate seamlessly with the way Twitter’s users already interact with their system.

Layering on a payments system would not only make the feature instantly used, it would position Twitter to revolutionize how money is collected and exchanged on the Internet."

That's a pretty big claim and for it to happen the site needs to stop falling over every few days.

But the first steps towards making Westheimer's vision a reality are being taken, with Tipit - a new service for people to tip Web sites if they like what they see - now letting users "tweet" to make donations.