blippy and the over-simplification of sharing
December 14th, 2009 • posts i've written
New to the scene (beta), start-up Blippy hopes to allow you to share/discuss your credit card transactions with your friends. What’s more, they want to partner with sites like Amazon or iTunes to display more information about those purchases.
In my opinion, it’s a solution looking for a problem… I want all of my friends to see my credit card statements, but I’m tired of scanning and faxing them to everyone individually.
There’s a growing sentiment that someday everything we do will be 100% transparent and available to our social graph and that only older generations see an issue with that. I fundamentally don’t believe that to be true.
I do believe that technology is making sharing easier and less conscious. But what we share is still governed by certain motivations. We share what will activate desired responses from our peers and our communities. It’s a mistake to over-simplify our motivations for sharing and it’s an over-simplification to think that if there’s a sharing switch, we’ll automatically flip it.
A good deal of the transactions that Blippy showcases users sharing are affinities and plans for the future; both of which many services already fulfill while maintaining privacy and actually offering a greater ability to connect. For example, instead of sharing my iTunes purchase of a new album, it simply gets scrobbled by Last.fm when I play it (and the scrobbler also knows how often I play it, and if I ‘love’ it); and through Last.fm I not only communicate to my community there (and everywhere else that data travels, like Facebook for instance), but I can also use that affinity to find new connections with people that share my interest.
Blippy is trying to leap-frog over these services (especially services like Foursquare and Loopt) by being directly tied to the point of purchase; but I highly doubt we’ll see this behavior (broadcasting your credit card purchases) catch-on. Slightly more plausible, but still questionable, we may see services like Mint which collect your transactions send that data to third-parties like Last.fm to be broadcast from there.
Related posts:
4 Responses (add your comment)
-
-
chris cocca December 14, 2009at 1:52 pm
blippy seems to be pretty unbalanced in terms of benefits.
the “why?” for advertisers is obvious. it’s hard to see the where the value is for a user.
Trackbacks:
donate your two cents
NOTE: Anonymous and/or hateful comments get deleted. My blog, my rules.
I agree that Blippy seems to be a solution looking for a problem. My initial thought when I read the headline was that this service would be a great way to include friends and family in your quest toward sensible spending, via credit card transparency. Since there isn’t much info on the site currently, it isn’t clear if this is how they are marketing their service or not.
Initially, there will be a general reluctance to take part in a service that broadcasts what is traditionally seen as sensitive private information (e.g.: credit card statement info). That being said, services that attempt to persuade the public that sharing this kind of info can be beneficial to them, are only going to become increasingly popular. Eventually, all aspects of our lives will be accessible via real-time broadcasts, if the trend of integrating real-time APIs in applications continues. The real deciding factor on how popular these apps become is how flexible and secure their privacy layers will be, potentially providing users with a sense of comfort that their private information is only accessible by those they deem it should be.
It certainly will be interesting to see how quickly these sort of social applications become adopted by the general public, not the early adopters/hipsters.