Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Blippy Opens Up Credit Card Transactions


As the Internet matures, slowly but surely everything we do in the real world is going social. But there’s a limit to how much information we can explicitly share on all the various services. A new service, Blippy, launching today in private beta, has an interesting way to take something you do everyday, buy things with your credit card, and automatically push those transactions online for others to see and interact with.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/11/blippy/
"“The big question that Blippy answers is ‘What are your friends buying?‘,” co-founder Philip Kaplan (also known in the tech circle as “Pud”) explains. That is of course a take off of Twitter’s question “What are you doing?” — which was recently replaced by “What’s happening?” The key to all of those questions is simplicity. And despite being a concept that you have to think about the ramifications of, Blippy is perhaps even more simple because it employs what Kaplan dubs “passive sharing.” Again, you aren’t explicitly sharing anything via something like a message, your actions (buying things with your credit card) are being automatically pushed to the web. “Blippy provides transparency into normal everyday things,” Kaplan continues. This actually fits in perfectly with something Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently tweeted: “Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible.”

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