Conspicuous Consumption on Blippy.com
by Bill Haley, 1 Mar 2010
Bill Haley is one of the founders of PhillyCreativeGuide.com. He is also President, Interactive of Allied Pixel (www.alliedpixel.com), an integrated media production firm specializing in the convergence of HD video, web and interactive media. He can be reached at bill.haley@alliedpixel.com.
So I'm on the homepage of this site that launched earlier this year. Every few seconds a new message pops up: jivinivan got 3 apps from iTunes, benpritchet rented 5 movies at Netflix, jrfields321 spent $5.22 at McDonald's. It is mesmerizing, maybe a little disturbing.
Blippy.com is a site that tracks people's spending. As members make credit card purchases, the purchase details appear on the site, in real time. You might wonder, as I did, why people would want to make their spending habits public. Philip Kaplan, one of the site's founders, says it's "To tell people – friends, acquaintances, maybe even strangers – a little bit more about you."
So far, the biggest purchase on Blippy has been $15,789, for an industrial freezer. The smallest is 3 cents, for a Tootsie Roll.
Blippy is a data-mining dream for marketing execs and economics professors.
You can follow people, just like on Twitter. There is a bit of a voyeuristic thrill at viewing the most intimate consumptive desires of total strangers.
You can also comment on purchases. "You could have got it cheaper at Walmart" or "That's my favorite movie of all time" or "You're going to be sorry... that app is lame."
We're living in an era of unbridled online exhibitionism. There is practically nothing that's off limits. My 22 year old cousin posted a racy photo of her girlfriend on Facebook. Her girlfriend commented "That photo is so inappropriate! My boobs don't even look good in that shot." She didn't ask, though, for it to be taken down. Kids today.
I was born 20 years too soon, obviously.
From a sociological perspective, we've arrived at a point where you can construct a pretty accurate composite of a person – even someone you've never met – by collecting data across multiple social networking sites.
And in a society where capitalism is king and box office tallies make the evening news, it was just a matter of time until Blippy came along.
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