Blippy!

Tech Crunch (syndicated by the Washington Post) introduced us today to Blippy, a social media website that will publish your spending habits online. Although I expect Blippy to be a mostly benign presence in my life, I’ll allow for the possibility that it may eventually facilitate an added convenience or two, as Facebook has, thereby making my post-modern life a tad more shallow, a tad more vain.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve sent several messages via Facebook today; I don’t dare blaspheme the Zeitgeist. But I haven’t become “a fan” of too many things. I am not a fan, for example, of my state senators Harkin or Grassley, although I support some of their positions. When I think they should know something that I know, I send them an email. I understand one of their staffers reads and categorizes my message and I therefore have a statistical presence in our representative democracy. But I digress.

Blippy is an extremely annoying name. I would like to emphasize that. The spirit of the site is already on dangerous ground, much like the hipsters who drink PBR and watch B-movies for the delight of irony. They will soon be voting fascist, you know, to be cute.

Slippy, slurpy, burpy, Blippy! How cute! How non-threatening!

Aside from treating the things you buy as having some exclusively noteworthy value, and aside from that fact that Blippy users will soon be carefully choosing which credit card they use to buy things (Blippy will track only one credit card per user) so as to craft the desired online image of themselves, what could Blippy’s business model possibly be?

Blippy will have stores of data about people’s buying habits, broken down according to lots and lots of variables: location, sex, age, etc. In other words, a consumer-generated shopping survey that companies will prefer to purchase because it will be more comprehensive and cheaper than doing their own research.

Get in line for Blippy here!