Well, nuts. San Francisco-based startup Ribbon announced this morning that it had turned on in-stream payments through its service as well as integration with YouTube. That was a good story because Ribbon makes selling things online so very, very simple.

Through Ribbon, anyone looking to sell something can set up payment acceptance that can be embedded as a "pay now" feature into a tweet, Facebook update, blog post or whatever. Sellers need only upload merchandise to a Ribbon account and share it via the appropriate channel. 

If someone wants to buy an item from a tweet or post, they click on the Ribbon icon and are taken to a payment screen. At that point it's a matter of entering payment data and the purchase is done.

Costs are relatively high at 5 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, but there's no coding required, no payment gateway necessary and no merchant account needed. In other words, forget about making mobile commerce complicated, Ribbon has made it as simple as clicking on a tweet.

With today's in-stream payments announcement, the process became even simpler — and cheaper. Through Twitter Cards, Twitter's tool that lets developers embed links to their apps in tweets, buyers who clicked on the Ribbon icon could pay from within the Twitter app. They would no longer be redirected out of Twitter to the Ribbon site to enter their payment data. It made transactions more seamless, and as any online seller will attest, the more seamless the transaction, the more sales that are converted.

Plus, Ribbon had lowered their price to a modest 2.9 percent plus $.30 per transaction. That's competitive with solutions from payment gateways like Braintree and Stripe.

"This is great not only for consumers, but also for businesses and brands," said Ribbon co-founder and CEO Hany Rashwan in this morning's announcement. "Twitter is an amazing resource, and now with in-stream payments powered by Ribbon, anyone can monetize with just a URL and a tweet."

And then the "amazing resource" went and shut down that great idea. The very, very simple payment process had somehow run afoul of the Twitter powers that be within a matter of hours and the service was turned off.

In a post on the Ribbon blog, Rashwan reported that the incident came as a complete surprise:

"At around 12:24 p.m. PST, with no heads up, our integration of Twitter Cards was taken down, and now Ribbon links go back to Ribbon.co without the in-stream buying experience," Rashwan said.

According to Rashwan, the company had validated its use of Twitter Cards and received approval. 

Now the service is back to working the "old-fashioned" way, meaning that buyers are directed out to the Ribbon.co site, and Ribbon is left wondering what's going on.

Read more about in-app payments.