Send someone a cup of Starbucks coffee with a tweet

A new beta program from Starbucks allows any Twitter user to send a $5 gift card to a friend in need using only a tweet, as described by Mashable. The service, called Tweet-a-Coffee, only requires a few steps on your part to get it all set up.

You'll need to visit the Tweet-a-Coffee sign up page to link your Starbucks account to your Twitter account. The process is a simple as clicking few buttons, entering your login info and clicking a few more buttons.

Once you've got the two accounts talking to each other, you can send your first $5 cup of coffee with a tweet through the Starbucks site. Enter the Twitter handle for the person you want to send the gift card to and a short message in the provided text fields. Remember to keep it short, it's going to be sent via Twitter, after all.

The @TweetaCoffee account will then send a tweet on your behalf to the recipient, with your message. A few seconds later, a follow-up tweet from the official account will then be sent with both parties mentioned in it, providing the recipient with a link to claim his coffee.

After you send the first cup of coffee through the Starbucks site, your account will be ready to send coffee using only Twitter. Going forward, anytime you want to gift someone with some caffeine, compose a tweet with "@tweetacoffee to @[username]" where [username] is replaced with the name of the person you want to help get through a rough morning. Starbucks mentions several times on the support page that you'll need to be sure you use "to" between accounts names when sending coffee.

Easy enough, right? Just remember the service is technically in beta, so there may be a few bumps along the way.