Social Purchasing: The Next Big Thing?

On December 11, a new service called Blippy launched in beta. The premise of Blippy is to automatically push information regarding the transactions you make with a credit card online – for the world to see. CNet News has titled it “The Twitter of Personal Finance.” In theory, I assign a credit card account to my Blippy profile and each transaction I make with that credit card is updated to my Blippy stream and shared with my network. Eventually, Blippy plans to include a feature to automatically update your Facebook or Twitter accounts as well.

It will be an interesting project to watch. Certainly the idea of transaction tracking isn’t new – especially at the corporate level. Multi Service clients have been utilizing fuel cards to track driver locations and fuel consumption for thirty years. Fleet operations managers and business procurement managers utilize Level III transaction data and reporting to manage maintenance trends and business costs. Could a social streaming platform for personal finance management be the next big thing?