Friday, April 23, 2010

Trust your instincts with embracing "innovations" in consumer software

A fairly obvious search for “from card” this morning returned 127 results that included full credit card numbers.

This venturebeat.com story is a good example of releasing consumer software without any serious research or understanding of the cultural ramifications and side effects. Companies are learning/developing their business models on the back of the early adopters, and in some case burning them pretty badly in the process. This is nothing new but the pace is frighteningly faster compared to 10 years back.

My conservative recommendation would be for all current users of Blippy.com to destroy the credit card tied to Blippy.com and order a replacement. Blippy will find a way to learn from this of course, maybe they will buy a lifelock subscription for all of their current users (lifelock.. that is a whole another blog post).

My biggest take away is to trust your instincts, it is an expensive way to live life if you are an early adopter in all categories. Pick your passion/poison and restrict your risk exposure to those areas. Hopefully none of you signed up for Blippy.com just because it is cool. If you are curious about the disruptions and changes to personal finances and business models, then by all means go for it. The rest of us should wait for this mistakes to play themselves out before taking the next step.

Posted via web from Staysmall's posterous