

Review: Blippy ("What are your friends buying?") - PStamatiou
http://paulstamatiou.com/review-blippy-what-are-your-friends-buying

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prawn
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.

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dschobel
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...).

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prawn
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.

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jawngee
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.

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karzeem
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.

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thesethings
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.

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

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robryan
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.

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davepeck
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?

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PStamatiou
"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.

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richcollins
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.

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

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billybob
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!!!

