PASSIVE SHARING
Blippy, the new “Twitter of shopping”, is getting a lot of attention for letting you share your credit card purchases online for all to see. What people aren’t focusing on is how Blippy shares that info: automatically. You just give Blippy your credit card or merchant log-in credentials and they post your purchases almost in realtime (the actual delay varies by bank). “Passive sharing” is a game changer.
For example, wouldn’t FourSquare be better if followed Blippy’s example and automatically “checked you in” at the bar when you bought drinks with your credit card? Another example is TripIt. I love TripIt’s travel itinerary service in theory but they require me to forward all my flight and hotel info to TripIt’s system — which I usually forget to do. Why doesn’t TripIt just ask for my Gmail login and then parse what it needs out of my emails coming from Expedia, the airlines, hotels, etc.?
One of TripIt’s main features is the ability to share your travel plans with friends. However, when I flew to New York recently, my NY friends knew I was coming because they saw my Manhattan hotel reservation on Blippy, not TripIt. Why? Because I didn’t get around to actively sharing my itinerary with TripIt. When building a product/service it is usually best to assume your users will be lazy.
CONTROLLING WHAT NOT TO SHARE
It will be interesting to see what controls people want when the only active decision is what not to share. For example, Blippy started with:
- the ability to turn sharing on/off per merchant or credit card
- ability hide selected purchases
- clear, prominent “delete my account” link
Recently they’ve added (presumably due to user feedback):
- ability to see what you’ve previously hidden
- permanent delete
It seems that Blippy is still figuring this out. They’ve clearly sidestepped the Facebook Beacon debacle but most Blippy users only share a small fraction of their purchases, often just iTunes and Netflix. Perhaps people just need more time to get comfortable with Blippy before sharing more. Or, maybe it will take new controls like:
- hide purchases over $X.XX
- don’t display the price paid: always, if over $X.XX, for people I don’t follow, for purchases from selected merchants
- hide purchases containing selected keywords
- hide purchases in selected categories (ex: healthcare)
Ultimately Blippy will probably earn the most trust (and prevent the most privacy mis-steps) by proactively hiding potentially sensitive purchases and then asking you to confirm you want them public or deleted — sort of like when the credit card company calls to ask if a suspicious charge is really yours.
So, stay tuned. If Blippy can convince mainstream consumers to share widely then other services should pay close attention to Blippy’s privacy & permissions approach.
If you are using Blippy, are you sharing all your purchases? If not, why not? What would it take to make you comfortable linking all your credit cards?
great post phdc! completely agree, it is all about passive sharing, which for blippy requires full information access to everything i pay for. the challenge of course is ensuring that truly ‘sensitive’ information is not shared without explicit permission….i would argue that credit card purchases have a privacy quotient which is significantly higher than other forms of social sharing, and the bar for trusting that proactive filtering will be effective in that context is also much higher. an interim step might potentially be my blippy credit card, where i do the filtering instead of blippy.