In the past few months, mobile live video streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat have been all the rage. I've also been experimenting with Google Hangouts recently, and in the past, I've used platforms like ustream and livestream.
But, tonight on twitter, I think that the next big thing has found me. It's called Blab.IM and it's a combination of periscope, hangouts, and twitter. You can see from the picture above, there are four people who can video chat at the same time. There is also a live chat room, a twitter stream, and the ability to record these sessions with the ability to post on platforms like youtube.
My mind then started racing about the potential implications for Medical Education and for Advocacy. First of all, it's mobile, and this expands the potential audience for this chat to worldwide. Secondly, the root of this is on twitter, where there a lot more people on; and not google hangouts, for which there are less people on. Finally, unlike periscope and meerkat, the video and audio is on the blab.im site indefinitely, and not for a limited time.
In doing research, I found the video below about blab.im. In addition, I found a resource called "The Ultimate Guide to Blab.IM" by Marc Levy. There is also this article from Mashable. It's really cool that you can mark a "Question" in the chat stream. In addition, you can give "+1" to comments and the equivalent of "hearts" from periscope. There is so much functionality here, it will be fun to explore.
One thing that I look forward using this platform is at live events like medical conferences. How fun would it be to give live video updates from conferences, even with people at the conference. This was something challenging to do with hangouts, periscope, and meerkat. In addition, people can "call" in from off site and chat with us. The video stream is pretty solid and the audio stream really holds up well. I'll be curious about how the post audio and video files look like.
I pulled the slide above from a blog post entitled "Blab Tutorial: To Blab or Not To Blab, That is the Question" by Ian Cleary from RazorSocial. Other interesting questions brought up in this article include: Is Blab going to take over Google Hangouts? Hm...
You can see an example of a blab at this link from the business world entitled "Blab for Customer Service and Social." But, you can really see the potential for Medical Education, Advocacy, and Medical Conferences, can't you? If any one of my peeps out there want to jump in and help me experiment with this, let me know. I think this is going to be very exciting!