Many social media platforms tend to come and go with their hyperbolic claims of being the “next big thing.” The term “game changer” also tends to be thrown around pretty loosely; getting attached to whatever the latest and greatest platform happens to be at the time.
While the new live video host known as Blab seems like it could fall in the “here today, gone tomorrow” category, Mark & Eric are here to explain why that might not be the case, and why Blab has real staying power. Yes, you heard it here first, Blab is a legitimate game changer!
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Full Transcript:
Eric: Hi, I’m Eric Enge of Perficient Digital and you may have heard about that hot new video chat platform Blab. And today I am going to ask Mark Traphagen about that platform and why you should be interested in learning more about it.
Eric: Mark, I have a really simple question for you. What is Blab?
Mark: Well aside from what we do on these videos all the time, the Blab we’re talking about is a relatively new, live video chat platform. And it’s live streaming, which means that you can have up to four people live chatting at once on screen, anyone can watch, and people can participate in the comments.
So at first it sounds a lot like Google Plus Hangouts, but it starts to differentiate in a number of ways that I’ll talk about in a moment, but it’s grabbed a lot of people’s attention, it’s getting a lot of press and interest right now, so it’s something we’re really taking a serious look at.
Eric: Yeah you know I had the same impression that it had some similarities to platforms like Google Plus’s Hangout On Air. Can you elaborate on what makes it different?
Mark: Yeah well the first thing anybody notices going in is it’s just so easy to use. You can connect right away; you can set up a show with just a few clicks. You can go live at that moment on the air; you can set it for the future. It’s hooked into Twitter, your Twitter account, so you can easily broadcast it out to your Twitter feed. But people who come in and want to subscribe to the show can just make one click and they’ve publicized it to their Twitter feed.
So it brings in audience very quickly and that also happens during the live show. Another thing that I really like about it is the discoverability, and this kind of differentiates it from Hangouts as well. If you go to Blab.IM, the home page, you’re going to immediately see shows that are on the air right now. And you can choose from them, go in, and you’re with these people. And if there’s an open seat, you might even be able to join in and join them on the live chat.
The other thing is that, the conversations seem to just flow and almost be endless. You get new people in, you can run it like a talk show, you can cycle people in and out, you always keep interesting people in front of the audience, and my experience there has been that it’s extremely addictive, and sometimes the chats there can go on for hours. You just kind of have to pull the plug on them.
Eric: But Mark, I mean, social media platforms, they come and go, I mean there’s something launching every month it seems, you know it’s kind of crazy. Why is this not a flash in the pan?
Mark: I think, more than anything else, it’s the accessibility; it makes it easy for almost anyone to just start a conversation online and meet people face to face. And that’s one of the best things about it. My first experience, the very first day I was on it, I got to meet and talk with people whom I’ve always wanted to meet. People I’ve known through Tweets or on Facebook, but have never actually run into them at a conference or met them in real life. Here I am face-to-face and now we’re building a relationship.
So that accessibility, that anybody can do it, and that it, also, I should mention, just as easy, is when you do a show, if you record it, you have that option, if you record the show, at the end, you get a link within minutes to download the video but also download the audio separately, which I think is a real game changer, because the creators of Blab have said that their eye is on the podcasting market.
They really believe this is going to be a place where people, and people are already doing it including me, producing shows, on there, live shows so you get the benefit of the live show and all the interaction that happens with that, and then you get that audio file, that you can edit, put up onto iTunes, and you’ve got your podcast.
Eric: That’s awesome Mark thank so much for that. Sounds like a very interesting platform for people to experiment with.
