Blippy to shut down its social network for sharing credit card purchases online
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Blippy’s experiment of broadcasting credit card and online purchases across social networks is coming to an end, according to a report.
The Palo Alto company, which was backed by the likes of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and at one time valued at more than $46 million, is shutting down its social network, which also shared purchases to Twitter and Facebook, according to the website TechCrunch.
The service never really caught on, with about 100,000 registered users -- only 30% of whom actually shared a purchase through the social network, TechCrunch said.
‘According to CEO Ashvin Kumar, and depending on what analytics service you’re using, Blippy traffic would spike whenever press would cover it and then subsequently die down to levels that showed no signs of growth,’ the report said.
Kumar himself hasn’t shared a purchase on Blippy in about a month.
During its life as a social network, Blippy did run into some security snarls, exposing credit card numbers of a few users before rolling out updated security plans.
After launching in December 2009, Blippy added the ability for users to review their purchases in July 2010 in a move to drum up more engagement and grow traffic -- but that failed to bring the growth that Blippy investors and employees had hoped for, TechCrunch said.
‘The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of ‘get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later.’ But later never came,’ the report said.
Now Blippy is looking into offering a new product, one that the company isn’t ready to talk about just yet but is still likely to be called Blippy, TechCrunch said.
‘We’re basically taking the things that we learned from Blippy and applying it to a new set of projects. All of them which are in the early stages,’ Kumar said in the report.
Officials at Blippy were unavailable Friday to comment further.
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles