Blippy: Credit card social network lets you boast about what you're spending

The best way to explain Blippy is to imagine what it would be like if your credit card had its own Twitter account. Everything you spend is posted online to your Blippy feed, which is open to public scrutiny.

The founders of Blippy, one of whom spoke about the service at the recent TED2010 conference, hope that its widespread adoption will encourage people to be more open about their spending, and that being able to see what other consumers are paying will make people more finance-savvy.

It's an intriguing idea, but getting the full Blippy experience requires handing over your essential credit-card information. This is an idea that'll leave many people recoiling in abject horror, but you can limit who sees your transactions and the service has an extensive privacy and security policy.

That's where we come in. Yes, throwing privacy concerns out the window with gay abandon, we've handed all our personal, intimate information over to Blippy, in service of bringing you an inside look at the Blipperverse. Read on to find out what Blippy is all about, how well it works, and whether the concept of privacy has any future...

Update, 26 April 2010: The credit-card numbers of four Blippy users were indexed by Google, it was recently reported. Blippy briefly revealed the data during maintenance, and Google subsequently failed to remove the data from search results. Tom Krazit has the full story at CNET News.