banktime.com

Imagine having your every credit card transaction made available to the public on the World Wide Web. For most people, it sounds like an inconceivable nightmare, something that would surely happen only as the result of fraud or sabotage. For Philip Kaplan, however, it’s intention – and it’s something that happens multiple times a day, every day. Kaplan is the founder of a fresh new web site called Blippy (blippy.com) with a slightly bizarre, kind of ingenious twist: in an age of ever-decreasing privacy, where full disclosure is the new normal, Kaplan’s site will allow people to link up their credit cards so that the items/services they buy and their costs are auto-posted on a news feed similar to the social networking sites Facebook and MySpace.

Kaplan sat down recently with a reporter from news outlet CNN to discuss his novel concept. At the time of the interview, Blippy was only a week old. Kaplan is an author and former blogger of a site called “F’d Companies.” He is now focusing his attention solely on Blippy, which gets its name from the short “blips” of information that include the full name of items bought and where they were purchased. It’s like the financial version of Twitter. It’s a hard concept to wrap one’s brain around, but Kaplan swears that we are quickly heading for a future where all purchases will be totally public: what we pay for everything from our rent to our daily coffee at Starbucks. If you ask Kaplan, he’s changing the whole way that people think about money and privacy.

Kaplan is a living example of Blippy at work, having linked up both of his credit cards to the service. In the interview, he shared the story of how he purposefully bought a sex toy from a not-discreetly named merchant in a mostly gay neighborhood in his hometown with one of his cards, just to prove that he was wholly unashamed to share his purchases with the world. Myself, I have to give Kaplan incredible props for his audacity. But how many people are going to really jump in on this kind of thing?

Kaplan insists that the benefits of a service like Blippy are wide, and go far beyond just the obvious. He says that the idea for the service stemmed from a conversation he had with two of his friends (Blippy cofounders Ashvin Kumar and Chris Estreich), wondering what exactly would happen if everyone’s private financial details went public? Kaplan says that the Blippy service is a form of advertising for merchants, and also practical cost comparison for consumers who maybe are interested in a gym membership at the same place that their neighbor goes, but don’t feel like asking the cost.

Currently, Blippy posts are automatic – if you make a purchase on a linked-up credit card, it will automatically post to your account. Some Blippy users have a “public” card that is linked up, and a private card that they use for more sensitive or embarrassing purchases. This is what Kaplan calls “passive sharing,” like the Twitter or Facebook updates that users must proactively make to share their doings with their friends.