Social Media Site Publishes Credit Card Transactions, Gets Ripped by Colbert

On last night’s The Word segment, Stephen Colbert obliterated Blippy, a social site that lets users share and discuss their credit card purchases, or as it was termed by VentureBeat, “The Twitter for Credit Cards.” The Word last night (actually a phrase) was Consocor Ergo Sum – I am known, therefore I am, and Colbert used the segment to deliver a sarcastic diatribe about the minutely-detailed over-publicization of personal lives enabled by social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and now, Blippy. “The Blips make riveting reading. This is more exciting than going through old receipts – it’s going through new receipts!” Colbert said, while the screen flashed “On the cutting edge of boring” to roaring laughter.

Apparently, some well-known investors find Blippy pretty exciting. Blippy raised $1.6 million in venture funding from the prolific Ron Conway, Mahalo founder Jason Calcanis, Hot or Not co-founder James Hong, and venture capital firms Sequoia and Charles River Ventures. The expansion capital will likely be used for ongoing R&D, along with supporting user growth projected from opening the site to the general public.

While most of the posts on this site will undoubtedly be boring, if Blippy is able to gain traction, the path to monetization is much more obvious than Twitter’s, for example. If someone uses their Blippy card to make a lot of Amazon purchases, Amazon, along with its competitors, should be advertising on that person’s Blippy homepage. Blippy, like Facebook and Google, will be able to serve up personally targeted and contextual ads to its users, which in turn, will have high click-through rates. With its cast of investors (and novel idea), I would be surprised if Blippy didn’t become a large company within the next few years.