Commerce gets social: How social networks are driving what you buy

"Ryan Romanchuk recently bought some Scott Naturals toilet paper, refills for his Reach dental flosser, Strunk's The Elements of Style (fourth edition) — plus a Glock 23 semi-automatic pistol. In fact, every time the 25-year-old software engineer spends money — on The Hurt Locker at iTunes, or a Wolf Trap gold-mining sluice — he lets the world know on Blippy, a website that automatically and very publicly shares all of its members' credit card transactions in real time. Launched last January and backed by $13 million from investors including Twitter's Evan Williams and Sequoia Capital, Blippy also publishes transactions on your eBay, Amazon and other linked accounts. And because the site encourages friends to comment on items shared, it says users can "watch… purchases come to life".

For Romanchuk, based in Palo Alto, California, such sharing is a means of self-expression that earns social capital. "I share because I get validation through my peers," he says. "It's the most honest way I can express my interests and values. It's a great feeling to find complete strangers who have watched the same movie or read the same book, and it's rewarding when others reach out about the things I reviewed that I care deeply about. It also influences my purchases: if one of my friends watches a movie, I almost always add it to my Netflix queue."

Romanchuk doesn't mind that, last April, Blippy let Google expose some users' credit card numbers: he is hooked. Indeed, he has now got a job there writing code. "That initial fear [of sharing] is what really gets me excited about this space," he says. "You quickly realise that obsessively reviewing the things you buy is, well, a lot less scary than you thought, and you have fun in the process.""

Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)