Mouse & Credit Cards

Guess what I bought!

While listening to the latest episode of the This Week in Startups podcast where Jason Calacanis interviewed Philip Kaplan (of F*d Company fame), I learned about a new social network called Blippy. Blippy was founded in December of 2009 by Ashvin Kumar, Chris Estreich and (of course) Philip Kaplan with $1.6 million in initial funding. Blippy is interesting not because of the fact that it is a social network, but because of the niche it covers. Blippy is a social network that tells your followers what you are buying. How much information is shared of course, is determined by your user settings.

You can link a credit or debit card to your account or you can just link Blippy to your account at various retailers, such as iTunes, Amazon, Audible or Woot! And if you need to purchase a gift that you don’t want the recipient to know you have purchased, you can pause sharing on that account until after you make the purchase. That way your significant other will be surprised by the fantastic gift you’ve bought them.

This service is really interesting and as someone that did a personal finance podcast for quite awhile, I can see some ways that people could use a service like this to help them control their spending. My problem lays in the realm of privacy, which is what stopped me (so far) from linking any accounts or cards to my Blippy account. (I did sign up for one.)

How much information about my purchases do I want floating out there? Sure I can pause sharing whenever I need to make a purchase that feels too personal, or I can set the granularity of what is being shared a little higher, so that people only see where I made the purchase and how much it was for, but then what’s the point? The fun in a service like Blippy is in people sharing what they are buying with others and giving feedback about those purchases. Just knowing that someone spent $78 at Trader Joe’s isn’t incredibly interesting.

Then there is the question of how the data I’m sharing might be used. Are companies going to use my purchase information to market to me? I know that I can protect my feed, so that only people who I allow to follow me will be able to see it, but the privacy policy doesn’t seem to preclude Blippy from sending me offers on products and services that they or others provide, based upon my purchase history. Will I eventually be bombarded by requests to follow me from companies with related products that want to sell me their products? Or maybe I will be bombarded with advertising at the email address I provided at signup. I don’t want or need either of those scenarios to come true. Advertising is targeted enough these days. I don’t need it to become even more intrusive, especially in a service that should be fun and possibly educational, not annoying.

All that aside, there is only one more issue I have with Blippy and it isn’t really a flaw with the service, so much as it is a problem caused by how many social networks I participate in. I already have to pay attention to my Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. I don’t have time to monitor another social network in another browser tab. Now, if Blippy was tied into Twitter or Facebook or could be accessed alongside those services in TweetDeck or a similar application, I could see myself using it to some degree. For now though, I’ll give Blippy a few months to mature and then check back to see what it has become because I think it has real potential.

So, what do you think of Blippy or services like it? It seems to be part of a trend towards living our lives in the open. Is that a good thing or not? Give your two cents (or more) in the comments below.