On Sunday, Chris wrote a great piece about the demise of
Instant Media. If you don’t
recognize the name, you’re not alone, I know very little about it
myself, in fact, almost nothing.
All you really need to know is that it was a competitor of
Miro
(formerly known as Democracy Player) and it’s dead.
I thought it might be appropriate to put together
a little post, mostly to address why the news of the
software’s sudden exit (
a la Sunrocket, if you will),
despite being less than tremendous, shouldn’t go away quite
so fast.
Comparison With Miro
If you place Instant Media in a side-by-side comparison with
Miro,
it’s clear which is the more popular of the two.
I’M, as it’s called
for short, peaked at 750,000 registered users sometime back in late
’06.
And its important to note that that moment of success was a
short
lived one, despite the service having been around for many season prior
to that point.
Miro, on the other hand, managed to get itself, well,
considerably more fans, and in a relatively short time frame, to boot.
Clearly the team behind one was doing something right while the other
was…not.
That could very well be reason alone for Instant
Media’s
bowing out, as it were.
Disappeared Without A Trace
But it didn’t “bow out”, did it?
It strangely just disappeared. Its
creators/managers simply “took it off the air,”
without any notice
whatsoever.
Really, all that they’ve left in their wake is a
two-word
notice of “under construction” (a phrase too vague
to denote good or
bad news). That’s it. Under construction. That’s
all we’ve got.
Bizarre. Remember that this is a Scott Blum creation
we’re talking of. The founder of Buy.com,
a hugely successful Internet retail outfit. He was on a Forbes Top 40
list some time ago, whatever that counts for. And he’s
completely mum
about this whole thing.
Scott Blum’s Reputation
Personally, I couldn’t care less how the wind blows
on this issue. I
don’t use Instant Media, never have. But there are some out there in
Web 2.0 land
that likely did use it before Scott Blum and gang fled town.
As little
noise has been made about it, it’s clearly not going to leave
the best
of marks on the man’s reputation, and sooner or later,
he’s going to
have to explain why Instant Media was removed from the Web without any
advanced warning whatsoever.
It’s one thing to admit defeat and move on.
It’s another to go the
way of the dodo without leaving an intelligible note whatsoever as to
why it didn’t quite work out in the end.
This reeks of bad business, through and through.
Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
