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i've had my bank of america debit card hooked up to blippy since before they launched (and the product has come a long way since then). it's actually kind of e
by jmtame 17y ago
i've had my bank of america debit card hooked up to blippy since before they launched (and the product has come a long way since then). it's actually kind of entertaining with your friends -- contrary to what you would think, 99% of your purchases are boring.
they have really good privacy controls and already addressed the concern aaron patzer brought up in this article. if aaron wants to hide his lingerie purchase, he just enables "manual mode" and shows whichever purchases he wants (they'll be hidden by default). same for price. for example, you can show you were at banana republic and bought something without revealing the price you paid.
this pretty much feels like twitter, but instead of writing stuff, it automatically gets published when you swipe your card somewhere (or you can manually approve purchases, or retroactively hide stuff already published). there's still a social component where people comment on your purchases and ask you what you bought at certain places.
just wait until the celebrities get on this thing.
- dirtyaura 17y agoI personally don't believe that automatically streaming your actions is a good way to produce entertainment or meaningful information for your peers. We played with automatic location updates in Jaiku, but it was boring. Current trend of check-in models is a bit more interesting: you, as a person, are communicating something when you check-in. We had similar experience of streaming your last.fm feeds: it's just noise. We grouped last.fm entries to reduce noise. Once in a while, you could see one entry from persons last.fm feed and if you clicked it you could see more. It was kind of fun to see a glimpse of person's music taste now and then and some good comment threads emerged around these entries. But people always commented that one visible entry, thus we could have same effect by picking a random song from person's daily last.fm feed and forget the rest. Quote: it's actually kind of entertaining with your friends -- contrary to what you would think, 99% of your purchases are boring. This is the essence of it: how can something that is 99% boring can be entertaining? I strongly believe that if you want to build services around showing your actions, make it easy to people "lift" certain actions to be visible for their friends. Make it easy to deliberately communicate without writing. Don't publish actions automatically, that just produces noise.
- jmtame 17y agoyou may be right about the check-in model, and if that's the case, using a blippy card might be a better model to broadcast purchases. and it'd be an easier way to consume the data on the client (ie push notifications when your friends spend using a blippy card, it's practically no different than a check in at that point). i use manual mode, and i don't publish the boring transactions like my gas purchases. you can decide whether to unfollow people if they have boring purchases, but it's still interesting to see which applications my own friends are buying on the iphone, for example.