Posts belonging to Category Blippy

When I wrote about Blippy back in January, one of my first thoughts was that I wasn’t sure I quite understood the appeal, and that I (like probably many others) thought it might be a little too progressive for our current privacy standards – even on the web.

To refresh your memories – Blippy is a service through which users share information on items they’ve recently purchased with any of these accounts…

So it’s like Twitter, only instead of sharing random musings, you’re sharing what you’ve recently bought on iTunes or what you recently rented from Netflix, for example.

Now, this naturally raises privacy concerns. I mean, regardless of what any one can tell you, sharing your life’s financial details – even if they are just purchases – isn’t going to be easy. At least not to most, I would guess. Nevertheless, since it opened itself up to the public, Blippy has actually attracted a number of users – so obviously there are a decent amount of grown men who don’t mind people knowing that they bought tickets to the Icecapades (I’m sure this is a common one…). And the service’s latest announcement may actually help them attract many more.

Yesterday, as TechCrunch related, Blippy got a new look, complete with a new privacy feature.

The new look (as TechCrunch also pointed out) makes the site appear very similar to Facebook. The icons at the top of your dashboard are certainly strikingly similar if nothing else…

Some other new design features include the little notification tag – the “10″ you see above – which tells you how many new things you’ve shared since you last checked, the search box right above those Facebook-esque icons, which as you might imagine allows you to search for businesses and other users, and a general new look and feel with this blue bar serving as your main navigation – atop every Blippy page you visit.

But the redesign isn’t quite as significant as the privacy feature that comes with it.

Along with the new design, Blippy has also given you the ability to manually control which purchases from which accounts show up in your Blippy feed. It’s a setting that you’ll see below each account you’ve linked in Blippy, and looks like this…

You have this same option when you add accounts to your Blippy profile, but even if you’re already way ahead of the curve, and have been sharing on Blippy for a while, you can change your privacy setting for each account under “Accounts.” All it takes is one click of the mouse, and then any new purchases you make go into what is kind of like a moderation queue. You then review these purchases and decide which, if any, you want to share via your Blippy feed and which, if any, you want to hide (which you can share or delete later if at first you’re not sure).

And if you accidentally share one you didn’t mean to share, you also have the ability to hide it by clicking to your main Blippy feed and hitting the little “hide” command to the right of each purchase that appears when you hover over it…

Of course, adding this new feature isn’t changing the service at all. If you choose to link your credit and/or debit cards or bank account(s), you’re still sharing information on things you’ve bought and how much you spent on them. Still, the ability to control which items get fed to my Blippy feed certainly makes me a little more secure using the service. Plus, you’re never revealing any actual credit card or bank account numbers anyway, so it’s not like anyone could just check your Blippy feed and go on a shopping spree of their own. AND when you delete any of the accounts you’ve linked to Blippy, it claims to destroy all the data in addition to removing the linked account from your profile…

So, really, it may not present nearly as daunting of a privacy concern as you might think.

Either way, there’s only one way to judge for yourself.

So get your own Blippy account and let us know what you think about it!