• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 12, 2010

It still doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to me, but the "social shopping" phenomenon evidently makes a great deal of sense to people with lots of dough to invest in new sites. Tuesday brought news that a new social shopping site, Swipely, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding and launched its service, which allows users to update their friends on their recent credit card purchases. Investors included Index Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Yes, you read that right: Swipely, like its competitor Blippy (which just raised $11 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Charles River Ventures, among others) automatically generates a post describing each credit card transaction which is then shared with the user's group of friends. Users can add to and edit posts with additional content like photos of the retail establishment or product, their comments on the product, and so on. Their friends can leave comments or ask questions linked to the original post.

There are differences between the sites: Blippy focuses on the venues and amount of money spent on the credit card, while Swipely is more about the products themselves, drawing on a huge super-index of a quarter million catalogs, menus, and other listings of products and services.

What is not different about the sites is my total inability to comprehend their appeal. Most reporting on the sites' early progress manages to keep a straight face, but I just can't do it: I will confess that I am astonished first that anyone would want to use such a service, and then by the amount of money they have raised. Although we clearly come from different planets, I will try to explain my instinctive dislike of these sites, covering a range of issues from the practical to metaphysical.

First of all, they may not be safe. It's increasingly clear that social networks are being rushed into service without adequate testing and de-bugging of security features (even Facebook is still uncovering security glitches). A few weeks ago Blippy accidentally posted half a dozen credit card numbers online. Why would anyone trust these new, untested sites not to expose truly private financial information?

Second of all, they misconstrue the words "social" and "shopping." To me, "social shopping" means a group of people going out together to stores where they interact with each other while browsing or looking for a specific product. This is social because it allows an individual to solicit advice and critiques from their companions about a product before they buy it; I can understand the utilitarian appeal of this timeless activity. However, Blippy and Swipely only update your friends after you've bought something, meaning any interaction about the purchase in itself is purely retrospective.

True, it's possible that a past purchase can become the point of departure for discussions about future purchases -- say, as a woman assembles an outfit piece by piece -- but what proportion of purchases fall in this category? On the basis of my own purchase behavior, the "ongoing acquisitions" represent a tiny number of my overall transactions, and would be drowned out by a veritable flood of Starbucks lattes.

This leads me to my next point. If interactions about products are basically retrospective, it would seem to imply members aren't approaching the site from a utilitarian standpoint at all. And when you cross off that motive, there's really only one left (it seems to me): vain, materialistic boasting about what you own. I understand how this might be very appealing to some people -- we live in a capitalist, consumerist society, after all, and I like to own nice things as much as the next guy, possibly even more -- but personally it's no exaggeration to say every fiber in my body recoils in disgust at this idea.

But I could be wrong: is there some other reason people would want to use these sites?