Recently there has been a swathe of stories and ideas doing the rounds on the web such that I think, to some extent at least, we are becoming desensitised to precisely how moronic we are as a populace. I love the Internet, but recently I’m beginning to wonder if its all going in the wrong direction. I’ve never been an avid fan of social media; while I have both Facebook and Twitter accounts I use them half-heartedly and always with a twinge of shame.

Sometimes, though, something comes along that is so face-palmingly stupid that it is genuinely beyond
my comprehension. Today, that was Blippy, a ‘fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying’. Essentially, you link your credit cards to Blippy so details of purchases go direct to the site.

I’m unsure of what I hate most about Blippy. Is it the design, trying pityfully hard to look like Twitter? Is it shock that they actually succeeded in plumbing new depths of sheer banality? Perhaps it’s the fact that its users so readily give up potentially sensitive information without a moment’s thought? That they received funding for such a venture?

If you think I’m over-reacting, consider these scenarios (suggested by some mercially sane commentors on TechCrunch):

• Blippy suggests having two credit cards, one for private purchases and one for ‘public’ purchases, the details of which are automatically sent to Blippy. How long before you use the wrong card by mistake?
• Someone knows your address and Blippy account. Just spent $900 through Amazon? You’d better hope they’re not waiting outside your door for the postman.
• A nefarious individual gets hold of your card details – not an uncommon circumstance. They call up the card company; they may not have the password, but your publicly viewable Blippy account holds answers to a bunch of security questions.

Recent worries about bosses reading your Facebook profile are nothing compared to Blippy. For me, however, the security implications are of secondary importance. I’m honestly clueless as to why anyone (besides companies interested in the aggregated data) would find such a ’service’ or any interest whatsoever. It’s one thing to read that Jason Santa Maria wants some coffee. It’s another to read that he spent $3.56 at Starbucks.

It’s not limited to start-ups, though. My instinctive reaction to Google’s introduction of ‘real-time search’ was to hide it away with some custom CSS. When I search for ‘Jason Santa Maria’, I’m looking for his website; I don’t care that he needs a haircut. If I did, I’d look him up on Twitter, not Google.

Don’t get me wrong; the real-time web can yield interesting data, but this tends to be about the trends, rather than what is actually being said. Even then, that information often has little meaning to anyone beyond a select few. Matt Cutts recently wrote a detailed dissection of Google’s reaction time to the San Francisco earthquake. Impressive results, of course – it took around a minute or so for the first tweets to appear on the Google homepage. But who, besides the geeks, cares? If you’re outside an earthquake zone, does it really matter if you read about it 1, 10, 30 minutes after the event? If you think it matters, its only because Google & Twitter are telling you so. And if you’re inside the zone, then you sure as hell don’t need to break out the web search.

Both the availability and wealth of knowledge made the Internet what it is. Now, many players, big and small, want to concentrate on the immediacy and volume of information, regardless of its value. For me that makes the Internet a far less interesting place.