What is Blab?

What is Blab?

2025 update: Blab & Bebo shut down between 2017-2022. Keeping this post below live as it’s interesting to keep track over the years of (previous) social media/communication apps and the evolution of this. 

Recently, I shared a blog post when I was trying out Blab for the first time.   I’ve since had a chance to use it a few more times and am impressed.

Blab is a video chat app that actually launched in 2014, but seems to have really taken off in the last few months.  Their official website is: https://blab.im

It is owned by Bebo, a company that has an interesting history you can read about in the Bebo Wikipedia entry.

Mashable described Blab a few months ago as “being like Periscope for a group of friends“.  If you missed what Periscope is, it’s a live video broadcasting app that’s taken off this year, and something I thought had great potential and have tried out a few times, but found that the “one sided conversation” of broadcasting didn’t feel quite natural.  Blab solves that problem by allowing up to 4 people to have live conversations.  Blab is also a little more user friendly.

Blab is in “beta mode” meaning that they are still working on this and that changes can happen regularly.  If you are reading this blog post and something is out of date, please let me know in a comment.

How to use Blab

Here’s how you can also get started with how to use Blab:

1.  Decide if you want to use Blab on your mobile or desktop (or both)

I believe Blab is currently only available on iOS (Apple iPhone).  You can search for and download it in the app store.  There isn’t an iPad version available but I found if you search for “iPhone apps” option on your iPad, you can download the iPhone version, it just is not optimised for your iPad.

On a desktop, you go to the website: https://blab.im.  I opened it for the first time in the Safari browser, but have found you need to run it on Chrome to actually run a blab.  (If you’re a total beginner and not sure what a browser is,  this is the way in which you access the internet – Safari is the one which is native to Apple and the others you’ll have to download).

Do you or will you use Blab?