When I was at TED last month, I saw a demonstration of a new social network called Blippy. Launched in December, the idea behind the Blippy is to automatically and instantly share your credit card transactions and other online purchases with other Blippy members. An easy way to understand Blippy is to think of it as Twitter for purchases -- Blippy gives your credit card the ability to tweet.



It's an interesting idea, because the things you buy say a lot about who you are -- they are often more revealing than the things you say. Do you eat at McDonalds, or do you eat at independently-owned raw food cafes? Do you rent slasher moves from Blockbuster, or do you download nature documentaries on iTunes? Do you buy Ed Hardy clothes, or do you sew your own from vintage patterns purchased on eBay? Credit card data is something most of us think of as private information, but in this age of social networks, people are getting used to the idea of sharing private (and usually mundane) events in their lives. Blippy is an idea whose time has come.

When you register at Blippy, you can search for your friends to find out if any of them have a Blippy account. To share your own purchases, you must link to one or more online accounts you have at retailers like iTunes, Zappos, eBay, NetFlix, or Woot (the number of retailers continues to grow as more sign on).

Linking to retailers involves providing Blippy with your username and password, which, frankly, makes me a little nervous. It's not that I don't trust Blippy; it's just that I don't trust hackers who might think Blippy is a good source of passwords to scoop up and sell on the black market. You can also link your credit cards or bank debit card to Blippy to share purchases. Again, you must enter your account number and password at Blippy.

Blippy claims that it "performs super-human feats to protect your data" with "128-bit SSL encryption and 24/7 physical security in our data centers," and I have no reason to doubt their good intentions. Still, the only other person who knows my bank account information is my wife, and I'm hesitant to hand it over to anyone else.

It comes down to the fact that I don't care enough about sharing my purchases to take even the slightest chance that my bank account access info could be swiped. (Another thing to consider is that people who follow you on Blippy will know if you are out of town. Hopefully burglars won't read Blippy for leads.)

I'm probably just being paranoid. As of this month, Blippy is tracking $2 million worth of user transactions per week, and that number is growing, so clearly a lot of people are using the service.



The nice thing about Blippy is that I can reap its benefits without having to share my purchases with anyone else. It's fun to see what other people on Blippy are buying. I can see that Leo Laporte (the host and producer of the popular podcast, This Week in Tech) just spent $660.16 at the Omni Hotel Downtown in Austin, Texas. That means he must be at SXSW. He also recently rented Jaws, Up in the Air, and Taking Woodstock from NetFlix. (This reminded me to rent Taking Woodstock myself).



In addition to being able to see purchases made by individuals, Blippy lets you see all the Blippy member transactions made at different companies. For instance, you can see all the NetFlix rentals made by Blipsters here. The iTunes purchases (and downloads of free apps, which are also included) are particularly useful to me because I'm always interested in new iPhone apps and a lot of the ones that Blippy users buy appeal to me. When a purchase is published on Blippy, other Blippy members can comment on it, and the resulting conversations are often useful in helping to determine whether or not an item is worth buying.



For people interested in joining Blippy who aren't keen on the idea of sharing news of *everything* they buy, they should know that they have the option of reviewing each of their purchases before it's published. Blippy also provides you with a sticker that you can attach to the credit card you want to assign as your "public" card. That way, you can use your other cards to buy things you'd like to keep private.



Are you a Blippy user? If you are, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Please share them on  the comments page.

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.