We knew people would still keep adding money to their accounts even if this wasn’t mandatory anymore, but we were prepared for a slight dip in people funding their accounts. The good news is that there was no dip; people kept adding money to their accounts as if we hadn’t changed anything. This, combined with a healthy number of new people on Flattr, should result in more content to flattr and more flattrs for everyone involved – All around awesome.

One thing that’s important to point out is that despite this change we’re still big believers in the Give to get idea. Giving before you get is not just a way to make friends and pay small favours, it’s a manifestation of what you believe in. We believe that social micropayments will change how creators get paid online and we’ll keep on giving our full attention to it. As a one-off gesture in support of that, we’d also like to give something to you and the whole Flattr community. Namely, we’re not charging our service fee for the month of May, so don’t be surprised if your earnings last month were a bit higher than usual. And if they were significantly higher then, well, it seems there are other people out there that also believe in Give to get ;)

Thank you all for an awesome meetup on Friday! Hope you all were as happy with it as we were.

For those of you who couldn’t make it this time, there will be another one. We’ll just have to wait and see when that might be.

And even if you can’t tell from this particular picture, there were a bunch of girls here too!

People networked, connected and got to know each other as well as a bunch of the new team. We all talked about Flattr, programming, gaming, politics, technology, food combinations and just about anything you can imagine.

Thank you all! :)

Unfortunately it seems the weather gods are not with us and the weather is predicted to be cold and rainy/cloudy. So we decided that we’ll hit the Flattr office! How cool is that! If the weather is awesome though, we’ll do some last minute changes. Please rsvp in the Comments! (tell us if you’re coming!)
This means you’ll get a chance to meet both the fatboys and our beloved Kim <3
There will be snacks and possibly some beers.

Time is set for Friday the 13th of May, 18.00-20.00. At the office, Östergatan 21, in Malmö.

The Malmö based team, Peter, Linus, Leif, Pelle, Joel, Per, Marie, Niklas and Simon, are looking forward to the chance to meet you, other Flattr users, fans, and even critics to hear all of your ideas and suggestions for making Flattr better… and further widespread. Bring your cheers, jeers, pros, cons and all the brainstorming power you can.
Bring it all on! See you then!

We’re pleased to announce that our service update worked almost as planned. By ‘almost’ I mean that we didn’t plan for our new hardware and pieces of code to go haywire, but after some hours of courageous firefighting we launched the new and improved Flattr, just as we had planned.

The big news – Now you can flattr almost anyone. Since the beginning of Flattr times you, our users, have asked us for more great content to flattr. So we’ve brought you the whole internet. Or almost the whole internet, since we’re starting with enabling flattrs to Twitter user names. Almost everyone who’s someone has a Twitter account, so it’s tens of millions of creators you can show your support to now.

How does this work

If the creator you want to flattr doesn’t have our great button yet, simply submit their Twitter name in the right hand side of your Flattr dashboard. Once that’s done, feel free to send out a little friendly tweet. That way the person you’ve just flattred will know there’s money waiting for them.

If the creator then signs up to Flattr they’ll receive their money at the end of the month just as this happens with “normal” flattrs. If they join Flattr a month after you’ve showed their Twitter account some love, money will be taken from that next month’s Flattr means, not from the month you originally flattered the creator. A bit too technical perhaps, but we wanted to make sure money wouldn’t leave your account before the person in question had actually joined Flattr.

This feature is experimental, so if you have comments, questions or feedback please do let us know. We’re discovering and ironing out minor bugs as I’m posting this, so if you spot anything fishy, just let us know.

Background
During the year Flattr has been live we have come to an important conclusion. The hard part with Flattr is not to find people that want to support web content they love, it is getting people to understand that other people want to pay for what they have created. So the next challenge with Flattr is to create a system that enables people to flattr virtually anyone and that shows creators what Flattr could do for them. Oh, and it needs to be safe, non-spammy and scale really well :)

What we have done
Today we go live with our first experimental solution to see if this can be done. Finding an email address for a creator you love is not always easy, unlike finding out someone’s Twitter alias. So we’ve created a feature that lets any Flattr user store a pending flattr to any Twitter user. If the person on the receiving end finally joins Flattr, all the pending flattrs will turn into real ones immediately.

Please handle with care
This is our first attempt to help you support to the people you love, and it may not be perfect, so please use it carefully and bear with us. There’s a fine line between showing support and spamming a creator, and crossing it makes both your support and us look bad.

How to use it
Enter a Twitter name in the new box you find on your dashboard or flattr a thing in the brand new unclaimed category. This will store a pending flattr. You can tweet the user you’ve flattred, so they know there is flattrs waiting for them. When they join the pending flattr will turn into a real one. That means that as long as they don’t join flattr, no money is involved. Neat, right?

Over and out, awesome!

We considered doing this update during a quiet hour over the weekend to minimise disruption, but as we might need to talk to outside parties during the update we decided to do it on a weekday. And starting early in the morning with clear heads also helps, rather than fixing things in the middle of the night when every line of code looks like the chemical formula of caffeine.

Sorry for the trouble, and wish us luck on Monday. We wish you a good weekend in return.

What does this mean?

Flattr will continue to work exactly as it does today. We’re simply removing the one requirement that has kept some people away from Flattr and that’s caused some mixed feelings in the community.

If you’re someone that’s using Flattr primarily to make micropayments to others then you’ll soon have tons more blogs and websites to flattr.

If you’re using Flattr to both pay and get paid, you now no longer need to worry whether your Flattr button is active. Feel free to add money to your account and flattr others at your own pace.

If you have removed a Flattr button from your blog or website because it had become inactive you can add it back, it’s active again.

And if you’re not using Flattr yet, now (actually, Sunday) is a really good time to start.

Why are we doing this?

The give before you get principle has served Flattr well. More than 175.000 things have been flattred almost half a million times, and we have more impressive numbers up our sleeves. But we know this requirement has put some people off Flattr,  for example people that don’t trust new systems enough to enter their credit card number as the first thing. Which means there is less flattrable content out there than there could be.

The second reason for dropping the requirement is that … it seems we don’t need it. Originally we thought that Give to get was necessary in a world where everyone is both creator and consumer of the content. We assumed we needed to nudge people to give and not just get, but numbers show we’ve under-estimated our audience. More than half of people using the service only pay others without expecting to get paid on Flattr, which suggests that our give to get rule is outdated.

Thoughts, comments?

In short, dropping the need to add money to your account means that more people will have access to Flattr and there will be more great content to flattr. All around awesome.

We hope you’ll agree this is a good move for everyone. Please voice your comments, questions or concern below  – or if it’s relating to your account then through the support page.

The plan is, since spring and summer is almost here, that we’ll have a bbq in a park or somewhere shiny and just enjoy the sun and each others company. (In case it rains we’ve got the awesome office close by!)
Take this opportunity to meet other flattrers and flattrees. Talk about Flattr or other geeky stuff. Meet the new team members!

This is scheduled for Friday the 13th (lol) of May around the time 18-20. We’ll update you with more information about location when we know! ;)

Why do we do this?
We love the internet, we love creators, and we think there’s a flaw in the internets tubes so we wanted to create some glue.
 We’ve now tried our first glue formula for more than a year and here are some key findings:
People want to pay!

People want to pay!
The “Everybody thinks that everything on the internet should be free; no one wants to pay” mantra constantly voiced from various lobbying groups and other organizations as an argument for forcing you to pay is wrong. Now we know you want to support great stuff out there. Flattr proves that voluntary payments work!

So, if that’s not the problem, then what is the real problem?
Apparently people don’t realize that what they do has value, sad but seems to be true. So the real issue is, enabling you to pay for ANY content, giving to all and any people creating awesome stuff. You, the giver, has to be empowered!

For this we’re loading our guns with 2 cannon balls!

1. Revshare partner integration
Integrate Flattr with your content service and we’ll gladly share the fee from our service!
 Our API will be extended to enable flattring of ALL content from any user on a partner site. This is being tested right now and will be rolled out in May. Come join us with your service!

2. Reverse service integration
If certain web services and sites still don’t get that you want to pay, we have to enable it anyway! 
From 1st of May anyone can receive flattrs, even accounts without means (no more inactive buttons around the web).
And here is the grand plan: Everyone uses Twitter (It’s almost impossible not to find people onTwitter). So from 1st of May it will be possible to flattr them via flattr.com. And yes, that means any Twitter account (even those without a flattr account). This will be the first of a long series of services we will enable you to flattr. You asked for it, you’re going to get it!

Extra ball: Localization
By popular demand, and thanks to the community (hooray!) Flattr now speaks three more languages, German, French and Swedish. And more will come; any language you translate for us, we’ll add! You rock! \o/

Don’t forget, as awesome as all of this sounds, it’s not us, it’s you – You’re the ones who are demonstrating that you want to pay for things even when you don’t have to, and that is truly epic.

FLATTR AB partners with DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA.

Malmö – Flattr AB (FLATTR), the company behind the revolutionary website Flattr.com has partnered with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (NK). NK will from today use the revolutionary tools developed by FLATTR for financial distribution to handle their state finances.

- “We’re really happy to partner with a republic so that we can try out the possibility of using our tools for non-digital products.”, says Linus Olsson, chairman of the board for Flattr AB.

Last week, a delegate from North Korea met up in Malmö, Sweden, with the Flattr team. After a ceremony, where the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il was happy to have met the Flattr mascot also named Kim, the deal was put on ink.

- “The first time I saw Flattr.com was on my favorite movie blog. I’m a big fan of the movies and have always been thinking of how I can give back to that community, with no possibility of doing so cross-borders. After trying out Flattr on my own blog I decided that I would like to implement the same system for our own distribution within our republic.” says Kim Jong-Il, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The Swedish government has helped curate the deal.
- “North Korea has a long-standing trade relationship with Sweden since we financed tools for their workers in the 1970′s. We think that this deal can be an eye-opener for North Korea that we still have things of value in Sweden even though we’ve sold Volvo.” says Anders Borg, minister of Finance.

Flattr AB will get a fee of 10% of the money that is distributed, expecting a net profit for Flattr AB of 25M SEK (2.2M EUR) per annum.

Media inquiries:
Linus Olsson, +46-40-62 13000

Press images:

Kim Jong-Il trying out Flattr.com with Linus Olsson

Kim Jong-Il with Eileen Burbidge, deputy of Flattr AB