How I’d Improve Blippy
January 4th, 2010 Ryan Jones
So I’ve been playing with Blippy over the holiday break and while I find it to be pretty fun, I think it’s missing a few features that can make it really useful.
If you haven’t heard of Blippy yet, I’d sum it up by saying it’s Twitter for purchases. Basically, you tell Blippy your Amazon, Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes, GoDaddy, WineLibrary, Zappos, Audible, SeamlessWeb or Credit Card information and it then automatically posts updates of what you bought and how much you spent on it.
If you already have a Blippy account, my username is RyanJones
Yes I know it’s just another way to compare e-penis size, but it’s actually pretty cool to see what people like Matt Cutts and Jason Calacanis are actually buying wasting money on.
Here’s a screenshot of some of my recent purchases. The red boxes are mine, I’ll explain why below the picture.
You can see here that Blippy pulled in data from my Netflix account (I still haven’t watched that movie yet) my GoDaddy account, and my iTunes account. If you look closely though, you’ll see two charges to GoDaddy for $64.95 That’s for one of my servers. In reality, I only paid that $64.95 once – but since I added both my GoDaddy account AND the credit card that’s tied to it to Blippy, Blippy is reporting it as two different purchases. It doesn’t know that the $64.95 charge from GoDaddy and the later $64.95 that shows up on my credit card are in fact the same purchase.
Since I use that same card on Amazon and iTunes, Blippy is also double reporting those purchases. One solution might be to simply just tell Blippy about my credit card and nothing else, but then it won’t show the details of the Amazon and GoDaddy purchases. Likewise, if I remove my credit card then you won’t be able to keep tabs on my bar tabs. Hopefully Blippy figures out a way to treat these double purchases soon.
Other Features I’d Like:
I’d like the ability to make my profile public so that even people without Blippy accounts can see it. Blippy is still invite only and doesn’t have many users. By letting people make their accounts public, they could probably build up a lot more interest.
I’d also like widgets! I want to show my purchases on my blog, but without even so much as an RSS feed I’m stuck.
It would also be cool if Blippy could cross post to Twitter and FriendFeed.
They’re probably already working on it, but I want Netflix style recommendations. If I bought something on Amazon, I want to see stuff like “3 followers also bought this” and “people who bought this also bought this thing here…” That could be extremely useful when it comes to things like video games, books, or music.
I want stats! Mint.com does a great job of tracking my spending so I don’t need too many details out of Blippy, but some basic spending stats broken down by date and website would be pretty neat.
Overall, I think Blippy could be a fun service. Right now it just needs more users and features to get it to that point. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.
By the way, if you’ve made it this far, I still have a couple of Blippy invites left that I can give out. If you want one, and I know you, feel free to leave a comment here. Make sure you put your real email (it won’t show on my blog, but I’ll use it to send the invite)
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