THE PRODUCT GRAPH
Suppose you were trying to choose a hotel for a vacation to Hawaii. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know where your friends (and their friends) have stayed in Hawaii recently? Or, say you are about to buy an HD camcorder, wouldn’t you like to know who in your network already owns it? Well, Blippy knows.
Blippy is a new Twitter-like site that allows you to easily broadcast your purchase activity and see what your friends are buying at sites like Amazon, Zappos, iTunes, NetFlix, and more.
Blippy combines two things:
1. What are you buying?
2. Who do you know?
The result is voyeuristically amusing at first, then oddly addictive. It becomes clear that Blippy is building something really valuable: the “product graph”, a map of who owns what. You’re now six degrees of separation from a first-hand review of any product or service. Is that Maui hotel really as good as it says? Find the 3 people in your network who’ve stayed there and ask them. Are the extra features on the high-end camcorder really useful? Ask your friend who bought it last month (and see what he paid for it).
THE POWER OF PERSONAL REFERRALS
When it comes to shopping, using personal connections to help filter the internet is increasingly important for a couple reasons:
1. The Web is too crowded
Ten years ago you were lucky to find an online product review. Today there’s simply too much information and most of it is unhelpful. Try Googling a digital camera like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1. It has 30 million results. The vast majority of those pages are link farms or SEO pseudo-content. Not even Google’s famously accurate ranking algorithms can keep all the spam separated from the few trustworthy sites.
2. Online reviews are increasingly unreliable
Aggressive marketers are taking advantage of the openess of review systems, writing fake reviews, and compromising their integrity. Consumers are noticing.
Faced with these problems, consumers are using services like Twitter and Facebook to get product recommendations from people they know and trust. However, these services weren’t designed for this task. Instead of blasting “What’s a good dishwasher??” to all your Twitter followers, Blippy could let you ask just those people who’ve recently bought a model that you’re considering.
The way consumers find products online and decide what to buy hasn’t improved significantly for at least 5 years. Done well, the product graph could be a breakthrough. Of course, to build a really useful product graph Blippy will need to convince millions of mainstream consumers that it’s a good idea to share their purchase information — a tricky proposition. For now at least, Blippy looks like it has a good chance at making the product graph idea a reality.
