Blippy was a

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

sharing site operated from

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

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, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

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 (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

firms, including

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 Boston area Charles River. History The firm has raised over $4.3 ...

and

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

, and angel investors Evan Williams,

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

and

James Hong James Hong (born February 22, 1929) is an American actor, producer and director. Known as one of the most prolific character actors of all time, he has worked in over 400 productions in U.S. media since the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1950s. ...

. On April 23, 2010, social media guide

Mashable Mashable is a Online newspaper, news website, digital media platform and entertainment company founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005. History Mashable was founded by Pete Cashmore while living in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2004. Early iterations o ...

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

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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 TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high tech, high-tech and Startup company, startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. I ...

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