Mint’s Founder on Blippy: I Don’t Get It | Hacker News Reader

Mint’s Founder on Blippy: I Don’t Get It

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31 pointscwan31 comments

Ok, two things that bother me about Blippy:

The first is mild. Why do I want other people, even my friends, to know what I buy?

The second is: which creepy "friends" of mine want to know what I buy? Maybe the only reason to create a temp account with Blippy. Any friend of mine that looks at that setup account, ain't gonna be my friend any longer. Can I find out which creep looks at an account I set up?

Blippy seems to be all about conspicuous consumption. I can see how it has a chance to be very profitable, I just don't think the world needs any more of this.

i've had my bank of america debit card hooked up to blippy since before they launched (and the product has come a long way since then). it's actually kind of entertaining with your friends -- contrary to what you would think, 99% of your purchases are boring.

they have really good privacy controls and already addressed the concern aaron patzer brought up in this article. if aaron wants to hide his lingerie purchase, he just enables "manual mode" and shows whichever purchases he wants (they'll be hidden by default). same for price. for example, you can show you were at banana republic and bought something without revealing the price you paid.

this pretty much feels like twitter, but instead of writing stuff, it automatically gets published when you swipe your card somewhere (or you can manually approve purchases, or retroactively hide stuff already published). there's still a social component where people comment on your purchases and ask you what you bought at certain places.

just wait until the celebrities get on this thing.

I personally don't believe that automatically streaming your actions is a good way to produce entertainment or meaningful information for your peers.

We played with automatic location updates in Jaiku, but it was boring. Current trend of check-in models is a bit more interesting: you, as a person, are communicating something when you check-in.

We had similar experience of streaming your last.fm feeds: it's just noise. We grouped last.fm entries to reduce noise. Once in a while, you could see one entry from persons last.fm feed and if you clicked it you could see more. It was kind of fun to see a glimpse of person's music taste now and then and some good comment threads emerged around these entries. But people always commented that one visible entry, thus we could have same effect by picking a random song from person's daily last.fm feed and forget the rest.

Quote:

it's actually kind of entertaining with your friends -- contrary to what you would think, 99% of your purchases are boring.

This is the essence of it: how can something that is 99% boring can be entertaining?

I strongly believe that if you want to build services around showing your actions, make it easy to people "lift" certain actions to be visible for their friends. Make it easy to deliberately communicate without writing. Don't publish actions automatically, that just produces noise.

you may be right about the check-in model, and if that's the case, using a blippy card might be a better model to broadcast purchases. and it'd be an easier way to consume the data on the client (ie push notifications when your friends spend using a blippy card, it's practically no different than a check in at that point).

i use manual mode, and i don't publish the boring transactions like my gas purchases. you can decide whether to unfollow people if they have boring purchases, but it's still interesting to see which applications my own friends are buying on the iphone, for example.

Blippy seems like one of those services that people would use only because other people are using it (not because it offers a particular benefit). It's like the UGG boots of internet startups--someday, people are going to wonder what the hell they were thinking.

Pretty much every social-web-service people use is because of other people. I started doing twitter because it was great way to follow news from people I am interested in. Same goes with Facebook as well as Blippy. Having said that Blippy is definitely weird but it's internet and weird things have succeeded here earlier. I won't be surprised if this one does too.

Hey, UGGs are pretty damn comfortable.

But seriously, who thought it was a good idea to take Facebook's biggest blunder (Beacon) and turn it into a venture backed startup?

Sequoia Capital, August Capital, Charles River Ventures, Evan Williams, Ron Conway, James Hong, ...

Yes, I'm aware. I guess I should have phrased my question more explicitly as "why?"

Perhaps you should tell that group of investors how stupid their investment was. They must have been asleep during the pitch.

I'm sure they're not dumb, but it's not obvious to me why it's a good idea. Would you like to enlighten us? Because no one else here seems to have any idea either.

AFAICT it's not much different than Beacon, which was very quickly abandoned by Facebook after a huge backlash (and lawsuits). If it is different then I'm curious why.

Also, do you work at Blippy? Just curious... most of your comments here have been about Blippy.

props to blippy for having the balls to try something aggressive, instead of developing just a "me too" sharing site

Social software doesn't provide value unless your friends are using it.

I guess http://pleaserobme.com/ soon will list not only when you are not at home, but also what you have at home. So thieves know if it is worth it.

Considering that, statistically, most people are burglarized by people they already know like that shady neighbor, scheming friends, or crack-addict family member. This can only end in total goodness.

I can see the uncomfortable scenarios already:

Neighbor: Oh hai, can I borrow your circular saw.

Me: That one is broken, I got rid of it. (thinking: and you broke it.)

Neighbor: But I just saw on your Blippy feed that you bought a shiny new Makita.

Me: (thinking: Oh WTF? Damn you blippy!) Oh yeah, I guess it's not a problem. (now steaming inside)

Blippy is not for use with your everyday credit card, you're supposed to get a card specifically for Blippy purchases. Then when you buy something you want your friends to know about (like a new video game, tickets, etc.) you use the Blippy card. Blippy will make money from affiliate links for all the stuff people post and from getting people to open new credit cards.

wouldn't it take at least a day for the charge to show up, and thus a day for it to hit blippy? wouldn't most people be talking about their new shiny purchase way before that?

you just bought an ipad, you get it home and play with it, send out twitter messages and facebook posts, and then the next day blippy tells everyone you bought it?

Actually the charge takes place hours later, but I think the authorization happens immediately.

> "you're supposed to get a card specifically for Blippy purchases".

Ah. Now I get it.

they support most credit card/debit cards already though

I don't get it either. I feel like people should be paying me for this info. Free service? Please.

All this talk about Blippy reminds me of conversations people had about Twitter. If you were on hacker news in 07 and 08 people were trashing Twitter saying how stupid it is. I bet many of those same people wouldn't say that now.

In time this will become the norm once some safeguards are in place. Mint.com could facilitate and or create such a system (social banking/shopping) that has such safeguards and allows start-ups to plug into it.

I still would, and think the same for Blippy. I have nothing against people using Twitter, but I don't have a use for it personally.

God, can you imagine the conversations this will start? "So, I see you bought a new belt at American Eagle yesterday..." Kill me now.

Blippy should adapt into consumables: barcode scanner at home or on the mobile: scan in anything you open. Then a Blippy for food. Then place a barcode or QR code on your forehead, get that scanned in too by Blippy friends when they meet you! I'm sure all this information would be worth something.

I really hope that's a subtle reference to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

There may have been a subtle one, but I think what he was going for was the "let's report EVERY SINGLE THING IN OUR LIVES angle"

Is it just me or is Blippy really the multi-apex of everything that is wrong with web2.0, consumerism and what-not? I hadn't even heard about it before, and now I wish I didn't know.

What specifically is wrong w/ web2.0, consumerism, etc?

totally disagree. i think it is one of a handful of services that is truly pushing the envelope of social media and is experimenting with what exactly we are willing to share.

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