Blippr

Blippr is a "micro reviews" site born in the age of Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and so on. Whereas Twitter allows "micro posts" of up to 140 characters, Blippr asks you to review a book, game, application, movie or CD in 160 characters. This is a skill we've developed thanks to the limitations of SMS texting, and it may well concentrate the mind. It's also a tacit admission that, online, not many people will read more than 160 characters anyway.

More than that, Blippr is also about connecting with social networking services to exploit what has been called "social influence marketing". You may start by browsing random reviews, but ideally, all your friends will be using Blippr as well. That way you can follow your friends' blips, which you should find more interesting.

Your friends probably won't want to add yet another site to their workload, and create yet another profile page, but that need not be a show-stopper. They can post their blips from Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter.

Although it's very easy to create a Blippr account (just enter an email address and pick a password), users can sign in with an existing AOL, Facebook, Google, OpenID, or Yahoo account instead.

However, whether you want to allow Blippr access to your Facebook "profile information, photos, your friends' info and other content that it requires to work" is another matter. There are benefits to having a single identity across multiple websites, but there are also privacy implications.

Once signed on, you can pick a user name, a gender, and show or hide your age and birthday. You can also connect your profile to other services, such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumblr and Last.fm, and give Blippr temporary access to your Gmail contacts. This will enable you to build up your list of friends and followers.

Writing blips is simple because the site finds the book, movie, game or whatever as you type in the title. After you've saved your review, it can also provide an affiliate link so people can buy it at, say, Amazon.com.

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