Blippy was a
social media sharing site operated from
Palo Alto, California by a company of the same name, for users to post and follow each other's updates about their purchases of goods and services. It was described as the "Twitter of personal finance", and was often compared with
Twitter because it was based on that company's open sharing model. One purpose of the site was to facilitate discussion and comparison shopping among people who are connected with each other online.
As of July, 2010, the company primarily focused on social sharing of product and service reviews. The Blippy service was shut down as of May 2011.
History
Blippy was founded by Ashvin Kumar, Chris Estreich, and
Philip J. Kaplan. Blippy launched on $1.6 million of
financing from a number of prominent
venture capital firms, including
Charles River Ventures and
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...
, and angel investors
Evan Williams Evan Williams may refer to:
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* Evan O. Williams (c. 1889–1946), American football and basketball coach
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,
Jason Calacanis and
James Hong
James Hong (; born February 22, 1929) is an American actor, producer and director. He has worked in numerous productions in American media since the 1950s, portraying a variety of roles. With more than 650 film and television credits as of 20 ...
.
On April 23, 2010, social media guide
Mashable
Mashable is a digital media platform, news website and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005.
History
Mashable was founded by Pete Cashmore while living in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2005. Early iterations of the site were a ...
revealed that Blippy had allowed Google to index detailed transaction information, thus resulting in four users' full credit card numbers being exposed to the public.
A blog post from the official Blippy blog claimed the incident was "a lot less bad than it looks" and apologized for their mistake of putting credit card information in a hidden
div tag
In HTML, div and span tags are elements used to define parts of a document, so that they are identifiable when a unique classification is necessary. Where other HTML elements such as p (paragraph), em (emphasis), and so on, accurately represen ...
during the beta test period of the website.
This extended information was indexed by Google and was viewable in
Google cache.
A May 2011
TechCrunch article discussed the decline of the service as it struggled to find relevance among consumers. According to then-CEO Ashvin Kumar, the service was unable to significantly increase user engagement, indicating that Blippy, at the time, had only 100,000 registered users and, of those, only 30% had shared a purchase. Kumar indicated that the Blippy staff was considering moving in a different direction in the social commerce category away from the current Blippy product.
The service was shut down shortly thereafter.
References
Companies based in San Francisco
Defunct social networking services
Internet properties established in 2009
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