With the final canning weekend of the season in the books, two passionate Penn Staters are helping the cause by allowing Tweeters to raise money for the Four Diamonds Fund on PSUpledge.com.

Garrett Miller, a 2011 graduate, and Cory Trimm, a senior, started the initiative to help make cyber canning more interactive and easier to track. With the rise of social media, cyber canning — that is, using various personal social media analytics as a barometer to pledge money —  become a popular fundraising method last THON season, with thousands of dollars pledged based on Twitter statistics alone.

The first step in this process is logging in and allowing Twitter to authorize your profile . You’ll notice the ticker in the top right corner with a THON countdown and the total amount raised on the site right away. You can pledge just 25¢, 15¢, 10¢, 5¢ or even one cent per tweet sent between now and THON 2013, and you are given the option to credit a registered THON organization.

After signing up to pledge, you can follow other PSU Pledgers and see how much they’re raising, find top organizations and who is pledging to them, tweet totals, and can even make your profile private.

For peace of mind, no financial information is ever exchanged with PSUPledge, as the site does not handle any payment processing. Donations are made on the honor system through THON.org, just like normal. Although there is a verification system once a user reaches 50 dollars, PSUPledge is essentially a tracking tool, and it’s really up to the user to honor each pledge.

The THON total in 2012 was $10.6 million. And maybe, with the help of Twitter and PSUPledge, our best is yet to come.