Blippy: a Social Network Too Far?

I heard a rumour today that the Blippy social networking website is closing down.

What is Blippy?  Good question.

Blippy is based in California and was co-founded by Ashvin Kumar, Chris Estreich, and Philip J. Kaplan.  It was popularly known as ‘the Twitter of personal finance’

Believe it or not, according to the original Blippy.com website blurb:

‘Blippy is a service that allows you to automatically share your credit card transactions as you make them. This includes the place you made the purchase, the amount, and in some cases, the item. This is all placed in a social stream where other Blippy users can comment on and “like” the various items’.

Great Scott, that sounds completely appalling to me. As a fairly reserved individual who values her privacy, I can’t imagine why anyone would WANT to share such personal information. Unless you are a very bored exhibitionist with money to burn or, more likely, a would-be credit card fraudster.

Even so, there were some investors who DID actually believe that this was a good idea, and worthy of their financial backing, as some brave venture capitalists actually committed $12.9 million to the scheme, and at its peak, Blippy was valued at over $46 million.

Unsurprisingly the website has not been trouble-free. Back in April 2010 social media guide Mashable revealed that Blippy had inadvertently passed detailed confidential credit card transaction information over to Google, with the result that four Blippy user credit card numbers were disclosed to public view.

This was possibly what prompted Blippy to change tack and re-launch itself as a product review website. ‘where people obsessively write reviews about everything they buy’.

Now that sounds like a more useful concept to me. Before making any significant purchase I have frequently found it beneficial to check out the reviews and opinions of other customers.  It sometimes feels like things are getting out of hand though.  Just last week I bought some track lighting from a well-know UK online and catalogue retailer, and checked out a user review that assured me that the item was ‘conveniently located on the ceiling, and easy to turn on and off by means of the handy wall-mounted switch’.  How enlightening!  No pun intended…

 Why anyone would go to Blippy first rather than just check out the customer reviews on a normal retail site, I can’t imagine.  I have spent some time checking out Blippy, which still seems to be open for business and accepting new user registrations.  I found that, although there are undoubtedly some enthusiastic, obsessive product reviewers using the site, there is also a degree of confusion about what it was actually for. ‘Just wanna know what do this website do’ wailed one hapless rookie user.  I know exactly what you mean, mate.