Ribbon, a San Francisco payments company, made headlines early Wednesday with the launch of a new in-stream payment option for Twitter that lets users buy and sell items directly through the news feed on the social network. Now, just a couple hours later, Twitter has killed off the feature.
Hany Rashwan, the co-founder and CEO of Ribbon, told Mashable that the feature was pulled without warning in less than two hours. "We weren't given a heads up," he said. "There was no notice."
In a blog post, Rashwan noted that Ribbon had been in contact with Twitter in the past and took the necessary steps to "validate" the new feature before it launched.
"Before we released this, we made sure to validate our Twitter Card implantation, and all lights were green," Rashwan wrote in the post. "We’ve had discussions with Twitter in the past, and are eager to find a way to work together. This is clearly something that’s good for not only Twitter, but also for Twitter users all over the world."
The recently pulled payments option, which can see below, enabled merchants to process transactions from start to finish within a tweet rather than directing users to make a transaction on a separate website.
As it stands now, Ribbon still enables merchants to show off product information within tweets -- as they did before today's launch -- but without the new feature, those tweets now direct users to complete the transaction on a webpage hosted by Ribbon, rather than on Twitter's website directly.
Excited to announce in-steam payments on Twitter! Check it out right here in this tweet! rbn.co/cba7a2— Ribbon (@ribbon) April 10, 2013
Ribbon completed a $1.6 million funding round earlier this year and currently offers a similar in-stream payment processing option on Facebook.
Twitter did not immediately respond to our request for comment.