Spied on Sprudge.com: Andrew Hetzel’s takedown of Jonathan’s Card, a cheerful social experiment where Jonathan Stark threw his Starbucks card up on the web for the whole world to use - download it to buy coffee, or add cash and “enjoy some serious good karma.”

Techcrunch.com loved it, as did Eater.com.

Stark describes it as a “take a penny, leave a penny” approach to coffee: “get a coffee, give a coffee.” And he emphatically states that he’s not a schill. The Jonathan’s Card website opens with the statement: “In case it wasn’t obvious from the complete lack of design, this site is totally not affiliated with Starbucks.”

But it might be more complicated. Hertzel draws a link between the two on his website Coffee Business Strategies. Read his account here.

- Oliver Strand

UPDATE:

Jonathan Stark categorically denies schilling for Starbucks via this entry on the Jonathan’s Card page on Facebook; Techcrunch.com writer John Biggs follows up with a post titled “The Vast Starbucks Conspiracy: Jonathan’s Card Wasn’t Faked.”