Blab is the brainchild of Michael Birch, founder of the Social Networking site Bebo. A predecessor to Facebook and Google+, Bebo had significant success in the era of MySpace but floundered and failed after Facebook and Twitter began to rise to prominence. Michael Birch sold Bebo for hundreds of millions of dollars before it’s decline. He has now bought back into the business to totally revamp it with Blab.

Blab combines the best elements of a few existing services, mainly Periscope and Google Hangouts. It provides a uniquely interactive video chatting platform. Viewers join the livestream and can watch it as on any other service. What’s great about Blab though is the hotseating feature. There are 4 seats open in the conversation.

The person hosting the Blab can invite people to jump into the conversation, up to 4 people at a time. This helps the conversation to be far more interactive than a traditional webinar. Emphasis on people jumping in and out of the conversation also keeps things fresh and moving. If you’ve ever been in a teleconference with too many people then you’ll know what an arduous process they can be. Similarly, trying to ask long winded or technical questions via chat functions in webinars can become very tedious.

Blab is currently in Beta. The staff at Blab have opened it up at this stage to get user feedback and stress test the platform. This means that they’re engaging with community feedback and you can see the platform changing before your eyes over the days it’s been open to the public.

Features already in place include the facility to record and replay Blabs, up to 6 hours per single recording. It also includes it’s own version of a ‘Likes’ feature called ‘Feels.’ People can click the icon when they’re ‘feeling’ what you’re talking about. Unlike other Social Media platforms these ‘Feels’ don’t accumulate over broadcasts. This should help stop ego and vanity getting in the way of good content! They’re used as a measure of how engaged your audience is in the present, rather than a badge to show off.

The creators envisaged Blab as a truly Mobile Responsive platform. The idea is to be able to jump in at any time, anywhere. There’s a Blab App on IOS and Blab works within the Chrome browser on Android phones and tablets.

Blab has so many applications there’s no point listing them all here, but here’s a few we think are most exciting

  • Customer Q&A – Allowing customers to jump into the hotseat so you can actually talk to them rather than answer text questions. In depth discussion, a human face and other customers seeing your great customer service.
  • Interviews –  A great way to see which candidates are going to put themselves forward to answer questions. You can have lots of people interacting without having them all on screen at once.
  • Interactive Webinars – Add another level of interaction to your Webinars

You can sign in with Twitter to join the Blab community. There’s already a strong community and it’s growing every day.


Blab Expert Rob Thomas


Blab Complete Guide Tutorial eBook

 

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