How many times has this happened to you? You find a good network, platform, app or API to grow your digital IQ and performance, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, there it is, the “service is ending” announcement. Such was the case on August 12 with news of the demise of Blab, a live streaming app along the lines of Periscope, UStream.tv, Google Hangouts, and Facebook Live.
We are profoundly saddened by Blab’s passing. Like many content producers, we found Blab easy to use and easy to integrate with other social media channels. We often dropped in on marketing blabs and replays by other producers. And therein, according to Blab’s co-founder, lies one of the problems encountered by the service: too few users returned for replays. In an article for MarketingLand, Matt McGee suggests that there were subtle signals that the end was near. Here are a few highlights from what we’d like to think is a Blab post-mortem, along with a few expressions of condolences from the Twitterverse.
Blab, the live video chat platform that launched in early 2015 and quickly grew to almost four million users, has closed its doors.
Blab was sort of a middle ground between Periscope (single-user video) and Google Hangouts (multiple users). It allowed up to four people to participate in a live video chat and quickly became popular among marketers for its ease of use and integration with social media. Here at Marketing Land, we’ve been using Blab since February to offer our weekly live video show Marketing Land Live, and more recently began using the recorded Blab audio to turn the show into a podcast.
But there were signs in recent weeks that this was coming. For starters, there were numerous technical issues that cropped up and went days/weeks without getting fixed, if they were fixed at all. The Blab home page, which normally showed a selection of active video chats that anyone could watch, was showing mostly inactive chats that were 10+ days old.
Read the entire article at MarketingLand.com.
Rest in cyber peace, Blab. It was a great run.
Do you have a favorite app or service that’s gone, but not forgotten? Do you have suggestions on how to minimize the impact of a loss? Feel free to share your thoughts or expressions of sympathy in the comments section of this post.
GB O’Brien
LGK Principal
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