Site offers fresh avenue for personal exposure

Placed firmly in the "why would you do this" column comes Blippy which asks people to share their spending habits.

If you register a credit card with the site, every transaction bought on the card would be displayed to your friends on Blippy.

Can you imagine the interest your friends would have, say on a Sunday morning, flicking through your purchases from Saturday night.

Apart from plotting your progress through bars and restaurants, any last-minute romantic purchases would be open for scrutiny.

And not too many florists are open on Saturday night.

Blippy is backed by a Twitter co-founder.

It might sound like ridiculous oversharing, but Blippy is serious.

While there are plenty of websites focused on what people are buying, the site's founders think Blippy offers a new way to learn about deals and new products.

Blippy encourages people in the US to connect credit cards and accounts at e-commerce sites, such as eBay and Apple's iTunes Store, to their profile on the site.

Then, whenever they buy something in person or on the web, the purchase is immediately posted for their friends to see and comment on.

The idea emerged last year when co-founders Philip Kaplan, Ashvin Kumar and Chris Estreich started thinking about how people were comfortable about sharing all sorts of information on social networking sites, but not financial transactions.

They decided to see what would happen if people could easily share that information with others.

Mr Kumar is reported as saying the founders needed to convince a handful of friends to try an early version of the site.

Even Mr Kaplan admitted that at first he shared only one credit card he did not use much.

But, after publicly launching in January, Blippy has more than 13,000 consumers sharing their spending habits.

Blippy has also attracted $US1.7 million in investments from two large funds.

If anyone is considering joining Blippy from afar, please make Mack-line your friend.

Your buying secrets will remain confidential to the column.

Promise.

From today, millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser.

It follows a legal agreement between Microsoft and Europe's Competition Commission in December last year.

Microsoft committed to letting Windows PC users across Europe install the web browser of their choice, rather than having Microsoft IE as a default.

Figures suggest more than half the world's internet users have IE.

Testing for the update has been undertaken in the United Kingdom, Belgium and France.

The software update choice will arrive automatically for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, according to a blog post by Dave Heiner, Microsoft's vice-president and deputy general counsel.

The blog also contains screen grabs of the message as it will appear.

"Users who get the choice screen will be free to choose any browser or stick with the browser they have, as they prefer," wrote Mr Heiner.

Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera are the alternative browsers that people will be offered.

It might be a while before the opportunity to choose arrives in New Zealand but the progress is encouraging.