Sharing information among social networks these days has grown from your typical profile to nearly every bit of information an individual desires sharing, sometimes even information an individual doesn’t want shared. We’re increasingly sharing private details of our lives and one service takes a step further into that realm, socializing the purchases an individual makes.

Blippy, a rather hot web app recently, makes it easy to socialize your purchases from marketplaces such as iTunes, Amazon, Zappos and many more. The concept is interesting and could be fun, but is it really all it’s cracked up to be? Let alone being safe? We’ll find out after the jump.

Overview

The concept behind Blippy is simple, socialize your purchases. We all love showing off the new toys we’ve bought, new music or movies, etc. Many people already share this information via networks like Facebook and Twitter, but Blippy takes the concept further and actually makes it easy.

Contrary to what the home page may lead you to believe, you cannot simply sign in via Facebook or Twitter authentication. You’ll still need to complete the sign up process after connecting the service with one of the two major social networks. Fortunately sign up only takes a second.

Getting Started

Upon sign up, you’ll first be directed to invite or connect your friends to Blippy. They ask for your email address and password to find friends that may already be on the network. There is no indication this is safe at all. Personally, I do not feel comfortable sharing my email login credentials with any apps, let alone apps that make no effort to ensure users of their security.

Fortunately this is a step that can be skipped and returned to at a later time. Skipping step one automatically forwards you to step four, as steps two and three require step one to be completed. In step four a list of suggested people to follow are provided. I’ve followed a few people in the list, simply clicking their follow button. The process is completed without a page refresh.

Dashboard

Once you’re finished with Blippy’s list of suggested people to follow, you’ll be taken to your home page. From here you’ll see purchases from those you’re following and comments on their purchases in the primary column. In the sidebar you’ll find your account stats (followers, following and share accounts), Blippy highlights and your account setup progress.

Setup share accounts, customize your profile and invite friends to complete your account setup process.

User Interface Design and Usability

Overall, the Blippy UI is nicely designed with a simplistic, yet strong color scheme and layout, keeping theme graphics to an absolute minimum. The UI makes strong usage of JavaScript to create a more seamless and enjoyable experience. Navigating through the UI is straight forward and about as easy as it gets.

Adding Share Accounts

Adding an account to share purchases from is easy and there are a decent selection at this point, though I expect the list to grow if the app gains popularity.

You’re able to add credit and debit cards as well as bank accounts for purchases from marketplaces not available yet in Blippy. Though I would recommend setting purchase updates to manual.

Add Account

Once you’ve selected an account to add, you’ll be asked for its login credentials, whether you want purchases automatically or manually shared and if you want to share its purchases via Twitter. Then simply link the account.

An interesting note here is the message Blippy displays in the sidebar about security and privacy; a message that is certainly not effective in conveying quality assurance in these areas. Click the read more link and you get the details someone like myself may be looking for.

Though even the additional details don’t give me much comfort in light of the recent Credit Card snafu they experienced. Blippy did explain the snafu looked much worse than it actually was though.

Share Your Purchases

Interestingly, after adding my iTunes account and purchasing an album about 10 minutes later, the purchase was not recognized in Blippy – even after an hour of waiting and updating the account.

You can update a linked account by visiting your accounts page and clicking the update link for the desired account.

Final Thoughts

I want to like Blippy, and that’s saying something considering my wariness of web app privacy and security. I like the idea of sharing [selectively] my purchases with friends and family. Blippy’s interface is clean, fun and easy to use, making the concept work-able. However, I need more assurance my information is very safe.

I wasn’t able to try sharing any of my purchases considering Blippy wouldn’t recognize anything from iTunes, even after several update attempts, deleting and adding the account again and a decent waiting period (longer than I’d typically be willing to wait). Judging by the rest of the apps interface and usability, I assume sharing purchases is just as easy and enjoyable, though I can’t say whether or not there are any features missing or glaring annoyances.

Overall, I’m going to have to rate Blippy at 7/10 considering I wasn’t even able to use the app for its core purpose of sharing my purchases. Additional information on security and privacy would help as well. However, as the app UI seems to be done right, I may have just had a bad first experience that could pass as I continue using the app and it continues to mature. So take our rating with that in mind and that we may bump up the rating in the future.

Sharing your experiences with Blippy would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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