If you haven’t yet heard of Blippy.com, it’s a startup that lets you share your credit card purchases with your friends. It launched yesterday in private beta, and has caused many people to question the fate of privacy.
Judging by the comments on a TechCrunch article (and this one) about the launch, there are a lot of people who don’t like Blippy. Afterall, the concept of sharing credit card purchases can be intimidating. As someone pointed out in a comment at TechCrunch, you wouldn’t want a message like “Mary just spent $500 at XYZ Abortion Clinic” showing up on your Blippy feed.
Then again, the negative response might be a good sign. Take a look at the early reaction to Twitter. People didn’t understand why anyone would want to publish private “SMS messages to a public webpage.” No one saw utility in messages limited to 140 characters. The most remarkable companies were sometimes doubted at inception.
In my opinion, in order for Blippy to have mass appeal, it must offer a Blippy-branded credit card. This would eliminate most privacy concerns by making it easy to control exactly what purchases are publicly displayed. You don’t want that abortion showing up on your Blippy page? Well, then don’t use your Blippy Mastercard.
Simply put, Blippy has a lot of potential. A Blippy-branded credit card would alleviate the current concern over privacy, and facilitate the growth of the service. These kind of services are the direction the internet is going. Blippy is just the beginning.
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(Screenshot from DigitalBeat)
