Blippy Gives Popular Brands Top Billing, Ramps Real-time

Since increasing the site's focus on purchase reviews and capturing all activity by specific brands within the network, Blippy's direction has been becoming increasingly clear - surfacing popular buys by brand, and showing the most popular stores across the entire purchase sharing site. Today, the site saw a significant revamp which brings the top brands to the front page, increasing discovery and even showing what is trending across each of these top companies.

As was noted when Apple introduced Ping to create something resembling a social network around your iTunes purchases and favorite artists, a good percentage of Blippy's shares originate on iTunes. Today, the company highlighted nearly twenty brands, including not just Apple and iTunes, but also Amazon, Ebay, Fandango, Gamefly, Groupon, Hulu, Netflix, Safeway, Sephora, Starbucks, Target, Threadless, Walmart, Woot and Zappos.

New Categories By Brand on the Left, With Realtime Entries on Top

Choosing a company shows all shares from the network across that brand. Of course, choosing Starbucks fills your browser with lattes, mochas and iced coffees, while Fandango finds how many folks used the site to see The Social Network. Sites like Amazon and Ebay are clearly more diversified.

Blippy borrows from Twitter in a number of ways with its new site. The first and most obvious is the "Trending in" function for each brand. Trending in Apple? The always exciting "Overnight Shipping Charge" and "Expedited Shipping Charge", while the book "Free" by Chris Anderson is trending in the Amazon category. Also a Twitter-like aspect? When new entries flow into your browser while you are on the site, you are told how many await you and get the option to "Click to Refresh" (just like on Twitter search and the old Twitter).

The Amazon Page on Blippy Pulls In Purchases from the Store

Staying the same on Blippy is the same focus on pulling in your purchases, writing reviews on your content, and being able to connect to friends to find out what they're buying. But the new store features show what's trending across the network and helps surface buying from people you don't yet know. And you still get the option to make comments, or ask them to "Tell you more". And if you really like a product, you can become a "Fan" of it. As you can tell, I'm a "Fan" of Blippy. It's an incredibly versatile sharing network - the final step after you've said you've liked something and then visited on Foursquare. It's the result of you truly taking an action with something that counts - your money. In early October, the site was said to be processing more than $500k in purchases each day.

You can find my Blippy stream here: http://blippy.com/louisgray.