I just finished reading a long winded post over at TechCrunch about the waving good-bye to Blippy – the service that let you share your purchases with anyone who cared.
Things eventually quieted down as they are wont to do in media hype land. And then we kind of stopped writing about it, caught up in the hockey stick growth of Groupon and Facebook and Quora. We stopped writing about it so much so that we missed the fact that it pivoted from a purchase sharing site to a user reviews site, starting with the introduction of user reviews on July 23rd 2010 and then moving of the platform fully on to reviews by October of the same year.
“One of the reasons we switched to reviews was to increase user engagement, but that hasn’t really increased either, “ Kumar told me resigned, revealing that Blippy has 100K registered users and that 30% have shared a purchase — Numbers that are not spectacular. The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of “get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later.” But later never came.
What did come was the sense (and the whispers and the TechCrunch tips) that Blippy was over and that it was time to move on. For co-founder Philip Kaplan this meant stepping down as CEO to go make a bunch of silly iPhone apps at the end of March, telling PE Hub’s Connie Loizos that Blippy was “doing better than most people could do … But it hasn’t, like, exploded into something huge yet.” Which basically meant that traffic had leveled off. And the loss of its figurehead left many, ourselves included, concerned about the service’s future.
Well the truth is it doesn’t have much of one.
Well gee, I seem to recall suggesting at one point that this had to be one of the stupidest ideas (at the time) and regardless of how many millions were poured into it there was no way that Blippy would succeed.
I’m sorry but there is nothing interesting or fun about this idea. Just as it is nobody’s business as to what goes on in my bedroom, my purchasing habits are just as private and personal. The idea that wrapping it up in a bunch of social media mumbo-jumbo makes sharing that kind of information any better is fundamentally screwed.
Blippy is currently in private beta and this is one person who thinks it should stay there or be prematurely thrown into the deadpool.
Chalk one up for the cranky guy.
