Quick thoughts on Blippy

David Noël’s post earlier today got me intrigued about Blippy, and since he was kind enough to send me an invite, I plugged in a bunch of my accounts, and gave it a whirl. It was immediately scary and exciting seeing all of my purchases pop-up on the screen, which makes me fairly certain there’s something here…

If you’re not familiar with Blippy, it’s basically a service that collects all of your shopping data from an assortment of merchants, as well as your credit cards, and publishes it in a social stream for people to interact with. To distill down it to a few one-liners,  I’d call it:

  • A social Mint.com
  • Last.fm for shopping
  • Trends through friends

Bijan described it as: If Twitter asks the question, “what’s happening?” and foursquare asks you “where are you?”, then Blippy is asking “what did you buy?”

The initial reaction by most people I talked to was that they were a bit aghast in how much information they’d “be putting out there.”  Assuming Blippy lives up to their privacy statements, I’m not too worried about that. Obviously I’m a pretty open sharer, and I know plenty of people will be completely turned off by this idea, but I think that when you see the positive ways in which the data can be used, it outweighs the fears.

You see what your friends are buying, they see what you’re buying. You can ask questions, make comments, or ‘like’ people purchases. Obviously there’s a great data set there for automated recommendations, but more interesting to me is the potential to using your own network to get trusted reviews and opinions, at a time when I find that finding quality information like that on the web is increasingly difficult.

Right now I have a bunch of merchants (Amazon, Zappos, Netflix, iTunes) linked, as well as my main credit card. The former are terrific, as I shop at each of them fairly regularly, as do the people I’m following on Blippy.  I’m not sure the value of the latter and I’ll probably unlink it. The credit card purchases are fun to look at, but without the structured item detail, I’m probably just oversharing about where I like to get coffee and lunch everyday, and where else I like to spend money, but without any clear picture of what I’m spending it on.

If you’re on blippy, connect with me here. If you’re not, email me or leave a comment and I’l send you an invite.