Mark Geller

Blippy.com is the new social media site where users can automatically publish feeds of everything they buy. Unlike Beacon, the unsuccessful shopping news feed launched by Facebook and then scuttled due to negative user feedback, Blippy is entirely opt-in, and purchase notifications can be limited to specific vendors (Amazon, iTunes) or credit cards.

After using the site a bit, I am not sure if I want to publish my purchases in this way, or view all the purchases of my friends. However, given the early traction the site is getting, along with the A-list investors such as Ron Conway, it seems clear Blippy has an excellent chance of succeeding.

The contrast between Blippy and Beacon, in terms of their approach to privacy as well as user reaction, is striking, especially given Facebook’s recent decision to change the defaults for Facebook to make more content fully public and searchable. Of course, it is in both sites’ interest to maximize the amount of content that is made public by users. The more public content available, the more that content can be used to generate user activity and engagement as well as to target ads.

Throughout its history, Facebook has taken an aggressive stance toward making different types of content public on an opt-out basis (i.e., without getting user permission first). The strategy worked well with publishing the initial News Feed, not so well with Beacon, and the jury is still out on the latest shift in publishing defaults.

As an aside, by adopting a brand identity with users as a company that will periodically “lead the way” to broader public publishing of previously semi-private information, I believe Facebook has a strategic advantage over larger companies, such as Google, who simply cannot take this aggressive an approach due to not wanting to damage the user trust that drives their $185 billion core search business.

Meanwhile, Blippy has established an effective middle ground–publishing data publicly that was previously thought to be highly private, credit card purchases, however doing it in a way where users feel in control. By adding extra value such as filtering for the most important/interesting purchases and linking to vendors for follow-on sales, this will be a highly valuable business if users adopt it.

As the pendulum shifts toward users becoming increasingly comfortable publishing what until recently has been considered private data, it makes me wonder if we will begin to see other startups publishing data considered now to be even more private, such as:

• medical records, results of doctor visits
• body metric data, including sleep/wake cycles, exercise, and sex
• pay stubs, charitable donations, tax returns, bank balances
• TV watching, including pauses and rewinds
• school grades, attendance, homework, and test scores
• voting for public elections
• DNA and genetic conditions

In other words, is there any type of data so private, users will not eventually be willing to share it in an automated way, with their friends and/or the world? Americans of a certain age (say, born before 1990) have been raised to believe that privacy is a fundamental right, necessary for maintaining a healthy psychology, and a source of national pride. However, if there are enough safeguards in place against discrimination, minimal social backlash against individual habits, and greater value derived from sharing information with friends, we may see users choosing to make more data public than we think.