Blippy was a

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

sharing site operated from

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

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 Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

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 Funding is the act of providing resources to finance a need, program, or project. While this is usually in the form of money, it can also take the form of effort or time from an organization or company. Generally, this word is used when a firm use ...

from a number of prominent

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

firms, including

Charles River Ventures Charles River Ventures (CRV) is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of MIT. Its name comes from the Charles River. History The firm has ra ...

and Sequoia Capital, and angel investors Evan Williams,

Jason Calacanis Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970) is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York. His second venture, Weblogs, Inc., a publishing company tha ...

and James Hong. On April 23, 2010, social media guide Mashable 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 during the beta test period of the website. This extended information was indexed by Google and was viewable in

Google cache Search engine cache is a cache of web pages that shows the page as it was when it was indexed by a web crawler. Cached versions of web pages can be used to view the contents of a page when the live version cannot be reached, has been altered or ...

. A May 2011

TechCrunch TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...

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 {{socialnetwork-stub