You can now buy things with just two tweets

Rosa Golijan , NBC News ? ? ? 1 hr.

Thanks to a partnership between American Express and Twitter, you can now connect your credit card to your social media account and make purchases by tweeting special hashtags. What could possibly go wrong with this arrangement?

In theory, the whole system is fairly simple. You connect your American Express card to your Twitter account. After that one-time setup, you just tweet a special hashtag ? such as #BuyAmexGiftCard25, which indicates you want to buy a $25 American Express Gift Card ? and you'll get a response containing a confirmation hashtag from @AmexSync. Tweet that second hashtag and your purchase will be confirmed and shipped.

The new purchase process is an expansion of AmexSync, a program which previously allowed folks to claim discounts and special offers by linking their American Express cards to their Twitter accounts and then tweeting certain hashtags. (You can still continue grabbing deals with this method, but now you can also just skip straight to the actual purchasing process.)

We've reached out to American Express for more details about the new AmexSync purchase process because we imagine that there is room for abuse. What happens if someone retweets a tweet with one of those special purchase-triggering hashtags? What if they do the same thing to a tweet with the confirmation hashtag? An American Express spokesperson reassures NBC News that the AmexSync Twitter bots are capable of tracking whether you're the one who originally tweeted a hashtag and anyone who retweets it will simply get a reply promoting the offer (rather than a purchase confirmation).

No word as to whether American Express is working on a way to avoid late-night drunk-tweeting sessions before they get expensive.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/you-can-now-buy-things-just-two-tweets-1C8337763

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