Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That, of course, is social’s great fear: that no one will come to the party, and that those who do come won’t hang around once it’s clear that the cool kids aren’t showing up. Blippy (which has since shifted to being a reviews site) is a particularly interesting case, though. It was arguably the most retail-oriented of social sites, because the data it posted was really nothing but a list of credit-card purchases. That’s fascinating stuff for retailers, a great potential source of insight into consumer behavior and a trove of CRM data.

Just one problem: Apparently, no one else cared.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why. The Blippy inspiration went something like this: Shoppers, especially women, like to talk about what they’ve bought with friends. Blippy would turn that into a social network. What could go wrong?

But Blippy assumed that its users would use their credit cards to buy interesting things—concert tickets, apparel, movies—and when those purchases were automatically posted to the Blippy site, they would spark interaction and discussion by Blippy “friends.”

However, Blippy didn’t just share the interesting purchases—it shared everything. A new pair of shoes or tickets to a show might be a topic of conversation, but Blippy also reported every latte, fast-food lunch, dentist appointment, oil change, grocery-store trip and parking-garage payment.

And short of using a Blippy-designated card only for interesting purchases—which is a lot more attention than most users apparently want to pay—means that Blippy generated too much information. It was forced over-sharing, and for most people it was about as interesting as reading a credit-card bill. In the end, it may not have been controversial or frightening so much as it was boring.

If it’s boring, it’s not going to get anyone to pay attention to a user. And if “Look at me!” really is the driving force for many social users, Blippy got it all wrong.

As convenient as Blippy’s success would have been for retailers, harvesting customer buying data just isn’t that easy. Loyalty programs are expensive and IT-intensive. Big social-networking sites like Facebook are under continuous scrutiny because many users don’t want to be forced to over-share. There may be a social-networking concept out there that will be a perfect match for both what customers want and what retailers need, but no one has found it yet.

Still, there’s hope. Social-networking entrepreneurs will keep looking for that concept. But no one will know whether they’ve hit paydirt until they try it out.