What Do You Think Will Be THE Next Big Thing

I keep thinking that eventually one of those micro-payment sites will take off and quickly become ubiquitous... where you have an account and can "tip" people 3 or 5 cents for an article that helped you out of a jam. Not so much as to justify a paypal transaction, but a small token of appreciation. Just think about how often you've gone to Google and had an answer to a difficult question within seconds. If I could tip the guy who wrote that a dime, I would... but I'm not logging into paypal to give him five bucks. And yet, there's a thousand people helped for every one person who would actually give five bucks, even if they could.

I search for an answer on some technical issue, I find a link to a forum and some genius has taken the time to respond and it works for me. Why can't I drop a dime on him? And why can't the website owner collect 3 cents of that dime for running the forum that appears on the first page of Google search results because it IS helpful?

But I don't think this will happen gradually, I don't believe that it can. It will be a Google or Facebook, or Paypal type of company that makes it work almost overnight by leveraging a lot of social power. It'll quickly become another icon next to FB and twitter and RSS that you just click on and select an amount. And if you randomly happen to make multiple payments to the same person, eventually you might get a notice that that guy is repeatedly giving you good info, so you might have the opportunity to follow him on FB or be linked to his own website or something.