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

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