Review: Blippy ("What are your friends buying?") | Hacker News Reader

Review: Blippy ("What are your friends buying?")

paulstamatiou.com

16 pointsPStamatiou18 comments

This is lovely and all, but what problem does this solve? I just don't have a "need more friends telling me I missed a better deal elsewhere" problem.

No idea. It's a damned brazen idea though. The value of the data is obviously huge, they just have to figure out some value proposition for the users (it's obvious from the other reactions that technically astute 20-35 year old men won't be their target demographic...).

I only skimmed the article so might've missed this, but you'd hope they'd work affiliate links in there on products and potentially split revenue with users. Even then, it's a pretty big step to hand over a bunch of your logins just to scrape a couple of cents from your handful of followers.

Once I ran a list of my ideas past a venture capitalist. He liked a good number of them, but for a few of them, he simply said "What problem does this solve?" and within a few seconds I'd realised that those ideas were likely duds or, at best, up-hill battles.

I think it's a good question to ask early in any idea brainstorming.

Store cards and rewards cards are a similar goldmine of information, but they provide quite strong incentives - frequent flyer points, discounts, etc. Not to mention, less risk.

Fair enough, but what problem does Twitter solve?

- building profile and spreading word about own business/products is harder without it

- longer-format writing (blogging) takes too long and can be too much of a commitment

- Facebook is a walled-garden and (at the time?) wasn't as suited to businesses

Step one is admitting you have a problem.

I have some friends who are "ultra efficient" in finding the best deals for just about everything.And me being the lazy types more often than not will just follow them and buy the same stuff from the same place if I need that stuff.Blippy will be pretty useful for that

What I've been thinking could work for that is a list of "things I've got my eye on". Maybe a digital SLR in the $1-2k range, a better iPhone deal, flights from AU to the US, a fridge, etc. And then the clever friends could act as 'buying agents' to help source the best deal and take a cut along the way. The original deal-seekers could list a target price they've discovered so far and have the agents look to beat it.

Agent offers could be on behalf of friends or friends of friends or 'approved accounts' to deter spammers.

All the original seeker wants is the best deal. The clever friend would be happy to help and split the affiliate cut with the host site.

With Blippy, I think notification of post-sale is mostly helping the followers (e.g., someone like you just wanting to buy what your friends have bought) and not people in the research or purchasing phase without a friend to follow.

Why don't I just publish an RSS feed to my bank account?

WTF is wrong with people. Are we really becoming this narcissistic? Don't give me the "deal comparison" bullshit, because honestly, who shops outside of Amazon, Newegg, B&H these days? Who doesn't already consult their knowledgeable friends before big purchases?

I dunno, maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I was raised to sort of keep those details on the DL AND I live in NYC were it isn't necessarily the best idea to be broadcasting my major purchases right along side my full name.

Including the dollar amounts is what pushes it over the edge. The number of ways this is helpful is massively overwhelmed by the number of ways it could get you into trouble.

As we've done with other nascent start-ups, I'm sure we'll all do a pretty bad job at foreseeing how it ultimately gets used, including me, but I want to throw this thought out there because I'm seeing a lot of criticism that's very high-level:

"Discovery" is something all these social sites, at the bare-minimum, do pretty well, and people use. No matter if the social object is music (last.fm), a link (Facebook/Google Reader/Twitter), (books) Goodreads, etc, it's a pretty well-trodden path: surface stuff passively (last.fm) or actively (Goodreads) to help your friends discover.

At the very least, saving money aside, Blippy is showing us what we are likely be interested in (because they are friends or people we otherwise respect + follow) are buying. And we're probably gonna wanna click over and see what it is, even if we don't end up buying/eating/driving/reading it.

To deny Blippy this utility, is to deny all social software of the discovery utility.

Since SO much human activity has commerce underneath it, the potential of Blippy to do all the same stuff the rest of the Internet is good at "How this person fixed their bookcase," "Who that person uses for bike repair," the potential is pretty clear, if a little low-level.

I question not the potential of how sharing consumer activity could be useful, only individual executions of it.

Facebook tried this already. They called it Beacon. It was a colossal failure.

There is a small amount of value here in that you and your friends can discuss good deals but you may not feel compelled to take up an offer until a friend that reckons it's a good deal actually does themselves. Apart from that there isn't a lot of value to the user.

I've thought about various implementations of this to do with affiliate marketing, but I wouldn't go as far as to link accounts, the value there would more like the people that have brought this item also brought type thing we see today.

I can understand what's in it for Blippy when I grant them access to my transactions -- hell, it's a gold mine -- but what could possibly be in it for me except a little embarrassment about how often I eat at Serious Pie?

The "don't overpay" mantra I keep hearing rings shallow. There are plenty of online comparison shopping sites to take care of that.

In aggregate, it might be interesting to see what my friends are buying, however? Music, books, and restaurants might be interesting?

"what my friends are buying" - yeah that's exactly what they're going after IMO, the whole "deal finding" aspect is secondary at best. I've found a few neat iPhone apps people purchased and books they're reading. And of course a very nice camera Jason Calacanis bought that I can't afford.

Twitter verticals seem to be an emerging trend (dailybooth, blippy, others?). I think that the follower / RT model is a great way to do collaborative filtering.

Well, I think we can close the polls 361 days early. We have a winner for worst idea of 2010...

Well this is great because I always want to know what my friends are buying oh my GOSH WHAT ARE THEY BUYING THAT I'M NOT BUYING I MUST CONFORM TO BE ACCEPTED!!!

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