blippr.com
On this early decade of the 21st century ADD has mutated from a medical condition into a way of life. Thanks to the way we can have access to content, we can (need?) to shift focus constantly between different conduits of information. From ten years ago, we’ve gone from visiting websites, checking our e-mail, and chatting on ICQ to a constant diet fed to us through RSS feeds, Twitter, Blackberry push-mail, and multiple messenger services at an ever increasing rate. If you use only e-mail and messenger applications you’re a web Neanderthal.
In this context, several new services have appeared to help us deal with this overload. We don’t have a miraculous way to read or write faster, so the only way to get all this info in and out of our brain is to cut the overhead, to be much more succint. One of these new services is blippr.com, which is still in closed beta as I write this. Blippr is a bit of a twitter + digg mashup for reviews of books, movies, music, and games. Each micro-review is called a blip, and it can be 160 characters long, plus a overall satisfaction vote.
I’ve been using it for the past few months, and I found out one important thing: I tend to not procrastinate writing up reviews because I know they’ll take around a minute to write. This is not only due to being short, but also due to the wonderful integration that blippr has with outside sources of information. If you’re the first one blipping an item and if it’s even not yet in their own list, it will show automatically what it is when you search, including covers for books, and trailers for movies, and give you an option to “…be the first to blip this item”.
Each item will then be rated based on the overall votes it gets. It also boasts a social model, in which you can follow or be followed by other people, which influences the weight of the votes when you are browsing the reviews. All in all – a clever idea, a simple interface, a powerful engine beneath the hood. And you can output what you blip into your “lifestream” – the cacaphony of little blurbs that make up what you produce publicly online.
