Halifax Company Launches First Canadian-Made Social Media Tool
HALIFAX — If you want to share a quick piece of writing with the world, you can use social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. If you are confident in front of a camera, you can upload a picture or short videos to Instagram or Tik Tok. But what if you simply want to talk?
One can argue the ancient form of oral communication is getting lost in the digital noise of the information age.
On June 2, a Halifax company named Watzan decided to fill the online audio conversation void when it launched ililli (pronounced I-Lilly), a social media platform where users can upload audio clips up to 15 seconds long.
“There’s no place (online) to talk, and no place that makes talk social,” says Watzan founder and CEO Charles Benaiah.
“Most of the people I know, when we’re getting together before Covid – and even now – it’s so nice to just hear someone’s voice; being able to hear someone’s voice, instead of reading someone’s tweet or looking at someone’s picture on Instagram.”
And what about the platform’s tongue-twisting, unique name? When the Watzan group was working on ililli, someone noticed that the waves of an audio file looked like a series of i’s and l’s—and ililli was born.
In many ways, this new social media platform has come from an unexpected place: Watzan has traditionally been a company that provides content curation for people in the pharmaceutical and medical industry.
“We typically created ways that helped physicians find content more easily-content they want, content they trust,” explains Benaiah.
Yet, Benaiah believes ililli will benefit doctors, much like Watzan has. A lot of doctors use social media and many would like to “talk” to their audience about medical issues and questions.
“We think that doctors probably want a way to talk about the content…so we started building this new product. We think this product has a lot of potential outside of pharma as well; that’s the part that excites us the most,” says Benaiah.
“From our perspective, we made it available to our doctors (first) because they’re familiar with us and we think we would like the service. But as this thing rolls out, we expect that a lot more people will use it for non-medical things.”
But why focus a social media platform on audio? What advantage does audio have over writing? Benaiah says there are a lot of people out there, like himself, who are much better at talking than writing.
“I’m not a journalist; I’m not a terrific writer and I don’t spell especially well,” he says. “Voices are really tremendous instruments. It can convey things with nuances that even the most sophisticated writers just can’t.”
So far, following ililli’s soft launch, the platform has 150 users – and growing. In a couple of weeks, Watzan is planning a full launch to market ililli to the masses. Benaiah plans on focusing on Halifax as a first step.
ililli is believed to be the first social media platform that was made in Canada. It is also very much a Nova Scotian endeavor, as those who worked on the project graduated from universities such as Dalhousie, Saint Mary’s, and Acadia.
“We’re really excited that we can create the first-ever social media platform built in Canada,” says Benaiah.