Blooie, Airtime and online chat - what's the future?
Two stories published in the last 24 hours, two startups tackling online chat in very different ways:
Airtime - http://allthingsd.com/20121002/like-eating-glass-sean-parker-on-airtimes-bumpy-launch-exec-departures-and-more/
Blooie - http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/03/blooie-launches-its-chat-platform-for-online-publishers-powered-by-the-interest-graph/
Not a fan of video chat, too evasive but matching people around web content is interesting.
Thoughts? Airtime building on top of Facebook with no platform of their own is massively dangerous. Don't understand the scale of investment when there's no control. Will take a look at Blooie, bit of an underdog in comparison, but prefer text to video. The key about Blooie is that it lives where the content lives. It isn't a destination site like Airtime. Users dont have to leave content to find a conversation. "I’m told that the chat logs themselves are never stored, it does give pause for thought" Some interesting scaling challenges there I imagine