Blippy?

Blippy. A service currently in private beta that allows you to display your credit card transactions to the world, in real-time! No, seriously.

Since so many people scoffed at twitter, and look at it now, I imagine a lot of very strange things are going to start happening online, like this. A lot of social networking-meets-whatever. Social networking-meets-automobile-wheel-rotation. Social-networking-meets-blood-donation. Who knows?

That said, I could see the use for something like Blippy, but private. I've been thinking for a while that if you really want to cut credit/bank card fraud short, find a way to put posted transactions in your twitter stream--the stream you receive, not the one you broadcast to others.

Of course, there'd have to be some improvements in the descriptions of posted transactions. You never know what a restaurant is going to show up as on your statement. And then the common practice of 'take a dollar to authorize transaction, refund it later' could become pretty annoying if it happens enough.

Just some interesting thought. The good news, though, is that even though we probably will start to see a huge rush of off-the-wall spins on social networking, a few of them will be amazing innovations that no one saw them coming, and the world will be better for it.

Or we'll all go crazy.

David