Yesterday, after unveiling an anticipated upgrade of its Apple TV set-top box at an event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs surprised attendees by introducing Apple’s new social network, Ping. The service, made immediately available to iTunes’ 160 million users, enables those who opt in to it to view their friends’ music purchases, along with which shows they plan to attend and what songs they most like — along with other features, like concert tour information.
On the heels of the announcement, numerous comparisons were made to the social network MySpace, which has ceded virtually everything but music to Facebook and now looks well-positioned to get clobbered by Ping.
Yet a smaller startup may struggle even more to coexist peacefully with Ping: 9-month-old social buying site Blippy, which has raised nearly $13 million from VCs and angels, principally August Capital and Charles River Ventures. While in one sense, Ping validates the startup’s raison d’être — clearly Jobs has observed that people like discussing the music they’ve bought –- it could potentially slow the number of new registrants to Blippy, where iTunes purchases are shared far more frequently than any other types of purchases.
As of today, for example, Blippy users have let the service track 389,217 800,565 of their iTunes purchases, compared with 249,112 348,389 Netflix rentals, 55,148 34,225 Amazon purchases, 1,459 1,290 Zappos purchases, and just 900 199 Macy’s purchases.
Philip Kaplan, co-founder of Blippy, hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment, but in a tweet after yesterday’s Ping announcement, he acknowledged the impact of Ping. “Apple’s new thing, Ping, mainstreams the idea of sharing your purchases,” he wrote, adding, “Which is both good and bad (I liked when Blippy was crrraazzy [sic]).”
(UPDATE: Kaplan just emailed to say that a small bug in Blippy’s interface rendered the numbers we published earlier today wrong. In fact, you can see from the new numbers in the text above that Blippy is even more reliant on iTunes’ purchases than we’d initially reported. Kaplan also writes that: “We admit there was something nice about being on the edge, ‘that startup where crazy people talk about what they’re buying.’ But we love Apple and hope they’re able to help take the idea of sharing one’s purchases to a wider, more mainstream audience. Fortunately for Blippy, unlike Apple, Blippy isn’t limited solely to iTunes purchases.”)
