If you’ve followed the GonnaGeek Network over the last year, odds are at some point you listened to or watched a podcast that was recorded via the Blab.im Streaming Service. If you’re not familiar with Blab the long story short is that it was a video-chat service featuring an integrated chatroom and the ability for participants to “call in” easily.
When podcasters/vidcasters first started to migrate toward Blab, many loved it because of its ease of use, community integration and its *ahem* reliability (yes there time that was true). However, as time went on (and more people discovered it) there seemed to be a drift. Many folks who used it as their service for recording their shows began to encounter more issues with some of them eventually migrating away. There also became a bit of a divide in users. There were the users who wanted to use the service as a broadcast outlet (such as the GonnaGeek Network participants) and then there were users who just wanted to get together with some friends and hang out.
A few months back, the team behind Blab held a meeting (I think they called it a town hall), and in the meeting it was mentioned that Blab would be continuing, but that their focus would be largely on the casual participant, not the broadcaster. It was around this time that many users began to doubt the future of Blab, with what appeared to be the majority of podcasters/broadcasters recognizing that if they were to continue using Blab, it would be a matter of time until they were forced to look elsewhere.
THAT TIME HAS COME.
Today Blab.im was officially taken offline. Visiting the website yields a simple message…
Time to say Goodbye
As of today, we’re shutting down the Blab Beta experiment and focusing 100% on our new project. For the full story, please read the message below.
While this may not be a lot of information on why the site is offline, there is a link to take you to an external page where co-founder Shaan Puri explains more. There is a lot of great detail in the post which I’d encourage you to read, but the short story is that they plan to relaunch Blab geared completely toward the user group that simply wants to hang out (yea – that one I referred to earlier). The post acknowledges a lot of ups and downs of Blab’s history, which again, I definitely encourage you to check out.
How is the community handling it? In my opinion, exactly as expected – some support, some disappointment and everything else in between. Again, these posts can be found in Shaan’s post.
In any case, thank you Blab for the product you offered over your (first) existence. While there were the fair share of issues, I know there were a lot of users which the service allowed to get their projects off the ground or even developed further (some GonnaGeek members included).
