"The younger generation, people in their teens and early 20s, are used to a variety of little payment methods, whether they’re using TipJoy on Facebook or using iTunes. They’re more adaptable than the older ones … who grew up with the Web and don’t want to see it change."

Walter Isaacson, in a Christian Science Monitor piece about using micropayments for online newspapers.

While we wholly appreciate Mr. Isaacson putting Tipjoy in the same sentence as iTunes,  we believe there is a fundamental difference between “micropayments” (iTunes, I suppose) and social payments that are centered around a gesture, a social gesture, as a means of both giving money and openly stating a preference, and in that difference may lie new business models.  ymmv, of course.